Election officials in two southwest Florida counties are not ending a contentious push to remove potentially ineligible voters from the voter rolls.
Gov. Rick Scott initiated the push last year.
But most counties in Florida stopped efforts to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the rolls amid conflicting legal opinions between the state and federal government.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday sued Florida, saying the state must halt the purge because it is too close to the next federal election.
But both Lee and Collier county officials say they will remove 25 voters in the next few weeks if the voters fail to respond to mail requests and a newspaper notice.
State officials initially asked election supervisors to check out the citizenship status of more than 2,600 voters.
Gov. Scott initiated push last year
Scott said the push to remove ineligible voters was needed to ensure that legitimate voters did not have their ballots diminished.
He pointed out that new data from state officials showed that more than 50 ineligible voters had cast votes and that nearly 100 non-U.S. citizens had been removed from the rolls since April.
"That's illegal. That's a crime," Scott said. "We know that over 50 of them have voted in elections. They impact races. They dilute the vote of U.S. races and that's not right."
The governor, however, did not note that many of those removed from the rolls in recent months were not on the list prepared by state officials but had been deleted local supervisors.