Miami Herald:

Browning refused to release the list.

“I consciously decided not to get them in the loop,” Browning said. “I didn’t feel comfortable rolling this initiative out. Something was telling me this isn’t going to fly. We didn’t have our I’s dotted and T’s crossed when I was there.”

Browning called it his “Spidey sense,” and said he was not just concerned with the numbers, but how they were obtained. His agency wasn’t doing the checking. Instead, it shipped names to highway safety, which performed the checks.

“We were not getting first-hand data,” he said. “I wanted to make we are 99.9 percent certain. I wanted to make sure the data was good if it went out under my name.”

Browning said there’s a good chance the names would never have been released. It wasn’t a “front-burner issue. Rick Scott didn’t order me to do this.”

All of that appeared to change by coincidence in February.

Browning was leaving office. At the same time, a local television reporter at NBC2 in Fort Myers decided to match Lee County voter rolls with a list of people who were excused from jury service after they said they were noncitizens. NBC2 reported finding nearly 100 noncitizens on the rolls. The local elections supervisor has found more than 40.