Confronted with a federal judge's looming deadline, Florida Gov. Rick Scott called an extraordinary late-night meeting of top state officials Wednesday to decide what to do about the state's process for restoring voting rights to former prisoners.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker gave Florida until Thursday to create a new process after ruling in February that the state's system is unconstitutional and arbitrary, with decisions possibly swayed by politics and racial factors.

The state sought to put Walker's ruling on hold, but an appeals court hasn't acted on that request, so Scott scheduled a clemency board meeting for 9:30 p.m.

The board consists of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi and two other elected Republicans. It's not clear yet what Florida's GOP officials will do to comply with the ruling, which the Scott administration has criticized as “haphazard.” The governor's office has said ultimate decisions on voting rights should be left to the governor and other state officials.

The clash comes as Scott campaigns for the U.S. Senate seat of Democrat Bill Nelson in a state where as many as 1.5 million felons remain disenfranchised despite having served their sentences and otherwise paid their debts to society.

Florida's constitution automatically bars felons from being able to vote after leaving prison, and Walker's ruling left that ban intact. Instead, he took aim at how the state considers who should get their rights restored.

Under the current system, a former prisoner must wait between five and seven years before they can even ask to have their voting rights back. The governor and the three elected Cabinet members then decide each request individually, subject to the governor's unilateral veto.

It wasn't always this way. Shortly after taking office in 2007, then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist convinced two of the state's three Cabinet members to approve rules allowing the parole commission to restore voting rights for non-violent felons without hearings, and ultimately more than 100,000 felons were allowed to vote again.

Scott and state officials changed the process in 2011, and since then fewer than 3,000 have had their rights restored.

Following up on his February ruling, Walker ordered the state in late March — without giving any specific instructions — to overhaul the process.

The clemency board — without holding a public meeting to discuss the ruling — appealed. Walker responded sharply, telling the state in early April to comply by Thursday.

“Rather than comply with the requirements of the United States Constitution, defendants continue to insist they can do whatever they want with hundreds of thousands of Floridians' voting rights and absolutely zero standards,” Walker wrote. “They ask this Court to stay its prior orders. No.”

Gary Fineout reports for the Associated Press.