1998–2000
Florida's 2000 voter purge
Florida hired a private vendor to remove felons from its voter rolls ahead of the 2000 presidential election. The error-prone list flagged thousands of eligible voters, many of them Black Floridians, who were stripped from the rolls or forced to cast provisional ballots.
Then
The purge fed into the recount controversy that decided the election; Florida later admitted errors and paid settlements.
Now
It became the standard example of how flawed lists disenfranchise eligible voters, shaping how courts scrutinize purge programs.
Why this matters now
Both programs remove voters based on error-prone government data, and both draw scrutiny over which voters bear the cost of the mistakes.