A federal judge in Fort Lauderdale ruled Thursday that Florida’s purge of potential noncitizens on the voter rolls can go on.

U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch said federal law does not prohibit the state from removing voters who were never lawfully eligible to register in the first place. Florida has identified 198 voters as potential noncitizens — among an estimated 11.4 million registered voters — and sent the names to independent county elections supervisors for their review.

A coalition of liberal-leaning voting-rights groups had asked the court to halt the purge, arguing in a hearing Monday that federal law prohibits purging the voter rolls 90 days before an election.

Attorneys for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner countered that the state could purge noncitizens at any time because they should have never been on the voter rolls.

“We’re very pleased another federal court has ruled that Florida’s efforts to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls are lawful and in the best interest of Florida voters,” Detzner said in a statement Thursday. “Ensuring ineligible voters can’t cast a ballot is a fundamental aspect of conducting fair elections.”

Zloch’s ruling follows one issued by a Tallahassee federal judge in June in a separate case filed by the U.S. Justice Department. That judge also opined that the 90-day purge prohibition in the 1993 National Voter Registration Act applies to people lawfully registered to vote, such as felons, and is silent as to noncitizens.

Zloch reached a similar conclusion. The 90-day purge prohibition, he ruled, applies to voters who have recently changed their address, but not to people who should not be on the rolls, such as minors or noncitizens.

“Certainly, the NVRA does not require the State to idle on the sidelines until a noncitizen violates the law before the State can act,” he wrote. “And surely the NVRA does not require the State to wait until after the critical juncture — when the vote has been cast and the harm has been fully realized — to address what it views as nothing short of ‘voter fraud.’”

Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has cited fraud as the reason for moving forward with the purge, despite critics’ concerns that lawful voters will be wrongly blocked from voting. Some of the people on the list of 198 potential noncitizens, based on a federal citizenship database, have told the Miami Herald they were citizens. Others said they are not.

About 58 percent of those on the list are minorities — 41 percent Hispanic and 17 percent black.

A poll released Thursday and conducted last week by Latino Decisions for America’s Voice, a Washington D.C.-based immigrant-rights group, found that 45 percent of Hispanic voters in Florida are “very concerned” over the noncitizen voter purge.

“What we’re saying is that going after U.S. citizens with Hispanic and Haitian last names and potentially disenfranchising them is not the right way,” said Jose Suarez, communications director for 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, one of the groups that sued over the purge. “The state has to find a better way.”

The labor union sued after the names of two of its members who are citizens came up in an earlier list of potential noncitizens. Four other groups joined the lawsuit; Zloch also ruled Thursday that two of those groups did not have the legal grounds to sue.

On the remaining portion of the lawsuit, the coalition had argued that the purge has had a chilling effect on voters and required the groups to divert resources toward identifying citizens wrongly identified on the state’s list.

But Zloch said none of that outweighed Florida’s interest in maintaining the integrity of the Nov. 6 election.

The state, he ruled, “has a compelling interest in ensuring that the voting rights of citizens are not diluted by the casting of votes by noncitizens.”

Keys election chief: I'm done purging voter rolls

Monroe County's part in the Florida voter purge of 2012 has ended, says Elections Supervisor Harry L. Sawyer Jr.

"Unless we hear from someone who says he or she is not a citizen, we're not removing anyone else from the voting roll," Sawyer said Monday.

"We do have a clear understanding of the National Voter Registration Act and we have to conform to it," Sawyer said. "We are not going to break the law even if the governor thinks we should."

A list sent out by Gov. Rick Scott's administration in May notified Sawyer that four people on Monroe County's voting roll might not be U.S. citizens. The statewide list of about 2,700 names was compiled from state drivers-license records of non-citizens.

"I didn't think four names out of nearly 50,000 voters in Monroe County was too bad," Sawyer said. At press time, Sawyer's books showed 48,155 registered local voters.

Sawyer sent certified letters to each of the four, asking them to clarify their status. One person responded that she is not a legal citizen. That person was dropped from the roll.

Florida officials are now seeking to compare thousands of more names from the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles' non-citizen roster against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's immigration database.

Federal officials refused, saying Florida needs to provide more specifics before receiving unfettered access to the national database. Monday, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to demand access.

In turn, an assistant U.S. attorney general said the Department of Justice plans to sue Florida for violating national law on voting rights by attempting to purge voting rolls too close to an election.

"The voting roll should be clean and we do our best," Sawyer said. "But we have to make sure that we don't take good names off the roll."

With the Aug. 14 primary and Nov. 6 general election nearing, Sawyer said, "Our office is in election mode. We're not going to do anything major other than new registrations and address or name changes."

"We're not going to get too excited about what's going on in Tallahassee now," he said. "We worry about Monroe County."

The state's overall list sent out last month "was old and not accurate," Sawyer said. "It has problems."

State officials have said they expect local elections supervisors to handle the investigation into suspect registrations. A former police officer, Sawyer said he not about to launch an inquiry "based on information when you tell me it's not that good."

"I know probable cause when I see it," he said," and it has not arrived."

Sawyer, a Republican retiring after this term, said state officials have not pressured him to pursue any investigation.

But staff at the main Monroe County elections office went in one recent morning to find its fax machine clogged by "40 to 50 faxes" from a South Florida Tea Party group "demanding" that Homeland Security open its database.

The forms -- "a stack a half-inch thick," Sawyer said -- were identical except each had a different sender name. There were no addresses to know if they are Monroe County residents.

"It bothered me because our office has no authority to demand anything of the federal government," Sawyer said.

Ron Labasky, general counsel to the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, said most elections offices have halted work on the state purge.

"Most counties got from one to four or five names," from the state list, Labasky said Tuesday. "The more populous counties like Miami-Dade and Hillsborough got more."

When "a significant number" of voters from the state list turned out to be legal, most offices have stopped pursuing it "based on lack of quality information," he said.

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