If You Can't Steal A Presidential Election...

...suppress the vote beforehand to make sure the results will never be in doubt.

Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida's voting rolls, a Miami Herald computer analysis of elections records has found.

Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal, the analysis of a list of more than 2,600 potential noncitizens shows. The list was first compiled by the state and furnished to county election supervisors and then the Herald.

The numbers change by the day. The state's Division of Elections says it initially identified roughly 180,000 potential noncitizens by performing a search of a computer database that doesn't have the most-updated information.

About 58 percent of those identified as potential noncitizens are Hispanics, Florida's largest ethnic immigrant population. They make up just 13 percent of the overall 11.3 million active registered voters.

Those who have been flagged as potential noncitizens by the state are being contacted by county election supervisors. Many legitimate voters aren't happy with what they see as a needless hassle from a government using bad data.

"I'm upset, because if someone is an American citizen, it is his right to vote. How can they be asking for this?" said Juan Artabe, a 41-year-old Democrat from Cuba who said he became a citizen in 2009.

"Very poor job by the elections department," Artabe said. He said he was contacted last week by the Miami-Dade elections office and sent in a copy of his citizenship papers so he wasn't struck from the voter rolls.

Working as intended, folks.   Florida's Republican party has complete dominance over the state legislature and Gov. Rick Scott signs whatever he wants to.  There's literally nothing Democrats can do to stop this variation on voter caging,  assuming that tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters are in fact ineligible to vote unless they respond to the state's inquiry.  If you don't respond to the letter by the deadline, you're off the rolls and can only cast a provisional ballot.  And of course, these responses and provisional ballots are not only voter harassment, but could potentially be "misplaced" by Florida election officials.

"Oh," but you say, "states purge voter  rolls all the time."  Not like this, they don't.  Think Progress:

According to data from the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections obtained by ThinkProgress:

- 1638 people in Miami-Dade County were flagged by the state as “non-citizens” and sent letters informing them that they were ineligible to vote.

- Of that group, 359 people have subsquently provided the county with proof of citizenship.

- Another 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county.

- The bulk of the remaining 1200 people have simply not responded yet to a letter sent to them by the Supervisor of Elections.

You can see a similar letter sent to alleged “non-citizens” by the Broward County Supervisor of Elections HERE. (“The Supervisor of Elections… has received information that you are not a citizen of the United States.”) If recipients of the letter do not respond within 30 days — a deadline that is mere days away — they will be summarily removed from the voting rolls. The voters purged from the list, election officials tell ThinkProgress, will inevitably include fully eligible Florida voters.

In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

Knock out a hundred thousand or so minority voters in Florida and Mitt Romney wins the state without having to lift a finger.  Republican Secretaries of State gave the election to Bush twice, once in Florida in 2000, and again in Ohio in 2004.  After Barack Obama's big win in 2008, they're not taking any chances now that they have control of even more state election boards, governor's mansions, and state legislatures.  The fix is in, and it starts in swing states controlled by the GOP at the state level.  There's no bigger single prize in that category this year than Florida.  Now that the state is fully under GOP control, they plan to permanently disenfranchise Democrats in the state so they remain in control unopposed for the foreseeable future.  And it starts with Gov. Rick Scott's "voter purge" of eligible minority voters.

We bemoan Egypt's rigged elections and say "Why don't they have a democratic process like we do?"  They do.  That's the problem.