I think my last trawl for information began with Wikipedia on Katharine Harris which had a bunch of footnotes referencing a bunch of newspaper articles. There is enormous controversy about it and the magnitude of the purge. It is a fact that simultaneous with most counties applying the purge lists, some only partially, others refused to use it, as in the case of the county where the Registrar or whatever her proper title was saw her own name on the list. It is established that in those counties, and maybe some others, people who did in fact have felony records from somewhere in the USA were in fact permitted to vote, many of them being on the purge list accurately. The controversy rages about what percentage exactly of the people on the lists were in fact not felons.Where can I find extra information on the voter purges in Florida in 2000? Do you know exactly around the time of they when they happened, and how could an official or citizen thwart it?
The time frame was between 1998 and 2000. In the wake of the 1998 elections in which people with felony records were shown to have voted, with Republicans arguing that this was a form of Democratic voter fraud, the legislature passed new laws mandating the state make more vigorous efforts to purge the rolls, and Harris as SecState had the responsibility to execute this function. Jeb Bush I hold responsible on the "buck stops here" principle of a chief executive being accountable for everything their administration does, but it should not be too difficult to find positive links in the form of directives to Harris as SecState and other documented communications I suppose.
In the late '90s, it was unprecedented to act as the Florida state administration did in hiring a private contractor firm to do their data searching for them, but this is what Harris under Jeb Bush did. It's good Reaganite doctrine to argue private is always better than public, and that hiring a contractor is the way to get anything done, but the J Bush admin pioneered putting this into practice in this application.
Harris as SecState kept on issuing directives for the firm to broaden its search and include people on the lists based on very broad criteria; the contractor objected, if not out of citizenship concerns then presumably with an eye toward their future liability perhaps, that following the directives would raise the number of "false positives," that is people who in fact were not felons, being included, and Harris specifically directed them not to worry about that.
I am no lawyer, but as I understand it is generally impossible to get a court to act preemptively on a law or executive action until it has had some actionable effect on someone with standing to sue as a result of alleged harm done. A law for instance could be passed in flat contradiction of near-universally accepted norms, but until it is acted on, no one can take it to court anywhere. But the sources I remember perusing said that some actions in the new purge regime were taken well before the 2000 election. As I understand it, part of the layered voter suppression strategy was to delay implementation in most cases until very close to the election, which obviously gives people little time to act.
It would be premature to act anyway even if courts would intervene in incomplete actions based on knowledge that Harris was repeatedly demanding modifications to capture more names at ever increasing risk of innocent people being swept up--because implementation would be a step finally taken by the state, not the contractor. One could defend a procedure that sweeps up a maximum number of names as a first step, if it were followed by due diligence pruning the haul back to verified cases. Until the process had reached the step of transmitting the lists to the counties with orders to act on them, one could not be sure such a proper reining in would not eventually happen.
So I suppose it would be impossible for any citizens to act to challenge the purge until at least one county did act on the lists, and some number of citizens who could show they had never been convicted of any felony anywhere could bring suit. I suggest they could sue on two counts, of wrongful disfranchisement under Florida's laws, and of libel by the state or county. I'd think the right party to name in a suit would be Harris and the Department of State, but again, I am no lawyer, perhaps only the county could be named since it would be individual county offices that did the actual purging.
Another layer of suppression involved limited, late and poor notification; I believe many, perhaps most purged people got no notice at all, presuming their registration remained valid since they had done nothing to put it in doubt, and finding out on election day that they were purged and it was too late to do anything about it.
So--for there to be an effective injunction stopping the process, or a strong deterrent in the forms of either looming legal liability, versus bad political optics making the process politically risky, it would be necessary for some counties to have acted promptly, based on lists that did contain a high number of non-felons, and for some of these purged citizens to find out. Obviously then some of them would have to happen upon the procedurally correct naming of proper respondants, citing the right laws, and choosing a court of first resort that was not actively hostile to their case.
Again being no lawyer it seems to me common sense that on the one hand, a court would countenance only limited redress, in the form of directing county officials to reinstate wrongly purged persons case by case, if a very small percentage of the former voters purged showed they were not felons. But if an early case showed a high percentage of "false positives," a reasonable court might, if presented with suitably well grounded arguments by the plaintiff, order individual county lists to be disclosed and scrutinized, and verifying that a large percentage were wrongly accused of having felony records, perhaps issue injunctions reversing the purge pending verifiably near perfect accuracy, and might demand some oversight over these claims. I suppose in such initial civil case trials, the injunctions would be limited to individual counties named in each suit separately. However, if notoriety about the process achieved a certain level it might become possible for other citizens to argue and demonstrate statewide coordination of such patterns, and perhaps show how they emerged from Harris's orders. Contractor witnesses or respondents might be named who could document their protests and overriding directives, if not persuaded to stonewall, and the appearance of stonewalling might feed into political backlash. It would be possible for the Clinton administration to acquire standing to act under Civil Rights laws and court rulings, though some strategists might prefer that Clinton not be seen as taking a partisan side. By the way in addition to a pattern of large numbers of citizens with no criminal record emerging, if the process can snowball fast enough, the plain pattern of racial discrimination in the naming of presumptive felons would also become plain to the courts and media. It does not follow this would not be spun away somehow.
My general notion is that initial phases need not require any partisan Democratic activity at all, and indeed Democratic party functionaries might prefer not to have such cases being brought, fearing a political boomerang effect. But initial action might be accomplished largely under the radar, by relative handfuls of individuals seeking individual or small class action redress, just wanting their franchise restored and their names cleared of allegations of felony. Note that it might be possible some individuals might suffer immediate harm beyond the loss of voting rights and the abstract damage of being libeled, perhaps losing jobs from private or public employment on the "grounds" the county purge could be presumed accurate and these persons were believed to be doubly guilty of both disqualifying felony records and perjury in denying these when questioned in job or promotion interviews in the past. I've never heard of this happening but it would hardly be surprising if it did, and a few cases demonstrating these kinds of damages might greatly increase the weight of citizens alleging harm by the libel.
Also, it is not clear to me as a non-lawyer whether libel could involve some criminal penalties, which would require parallel criminal law trials, or laws on the books mandate criminal penalties for abuse of state power in specific forms that might legally apply. Having a wave of criminal trials going on amid civil ones would add to the general bad political optics.
If the wave of litigation snowballs while Jeb Bush's state administration continues to push for the lists being applied, serious political animosity toward the governor might carry over to the assumption his brother is hostile as well and raise Democratic turnout while depressing Republican turnout a bit, as well as infusing some militant resolve into Democratic operatives and volunteers for more aggressive campaigning.
Alternatively, seeing which way the wind is blowing, Jeb might rein in Harris, changing his orders and consulting with her on how to salvage the operation, perhaps suspending the purge orders pending R&D of a more bulletproof way of achieving legitimate (in terms of Florida's laws if not my personal view of what election laws should be) approaches toward banning all felons and only felons. If he gets far ahead of the problem--either he falls back on more stringently vetted felon purge lists, with false positives effectively eliminated, which leaves people who were purged OTL unpurged and able to vote, or reins in the whole program, leaving even more, including some felons to be sure, able to vote.