Voter purging not just a Florida thing. Here's a report from the Houston Chronicle as printed today in the Fort Worth Star Telegram:
Texas aggressively purges voter registration files
The Associated Press
HOUSTON — More than 1.5 million Texans could be removed from the state's list of registered voters if they fail to vote or update their records in consecutive federal elections under an aggressive policy to keep files current.
One in 10 voters has already their registration suspended under the scheme, and for people under 30, the number doubles to one in five, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday ( http://bit.ly/...).
There has probably been no notice sent to most of these voters, so they will not be aware they are not on the rolls until November 6th when they try to vote.
They should then be allowed to vote a provisional ballot, but I'll tell you from experience that it is a lengthy and frustrating process here in Texas. We election judges/clerks don't like to do it. (I do anyway, but I wouldn't vouch for election judges across this very large state.) Once you have voted provisionally, if you check the wrong box on the back of the envelope then the vote is automatically invalid, and even if everything is done right I wouldn't guarantee that most election administrators properly evalute the votes and record them after the election. Remember, these are votes not counted when the normal votes are reported. The provisional process takes longer.
Very few provisional voters bother to check with the election administrator to determine if their provisional vote was even evaluated, let alone recorded. They are not told to do so nor are they told that they can check. For the most part provisional voters simply submit the vote and assume it will be evaluated.
I have never seen such problems, but I have also not seen an election which a party in power was trying to steal either. These are just weaknesses that I think exist in the provisional voting system here in Texas.
Still, now we know that Florida is purging voters to favor the Republicans and now we know that Texas is doing the same. What other states are reported to be purging voters?
What is the Department of Justice doing about these purges?
We know that the Republicans are sending robo-calls to voters in Wisconsin who had signed the petitions calling for the recall of Scott Walker and telling them that they have already done all they need to do, don't bother to vote. The suppression of votes is going to run fast and furious this fall.