Lawsuit prompts changes

New processes to review voter rolls

Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes may be fighting a federal lawsuit, but she testified Tuesday that it has already pushed her to do more to uncover people who should be removed from the county’s voting rolls.

Snipes is in court defending her office against accusations brought by the conservative American Civil Rights Union that the county has thousands of ineligible voters on its lists. The ACRU, a Virginia-based nonprofit, is asking U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom to order the county to take additional steps in purging names that don’t belong on the rolls. The ACRU claims the county in recent years has had more voters on its rolls than eligible voting-age residents, or at the very least, that it has close to a 100 percent voter registration that it says is “improbable.”

The trial in federal court in Miami could set a national precedent for how aggressive election officials need to be in removing non-voters from their rolls. The ACRU and other conservative groups have been challenging voter roll information in states and counties across the country.

Snipes said she is doing everything the law requires to keep the county’s voting rolls up to date, for the most part relying on the state to provide needed information about voters who have died or committed felonies, and using changeof-address information to clear rolls every two years of people who have moved. But testifying on Monday, Snipes said she is taking additional measures