County voting officials, aware of scrutiny and hoping to avoid 2000's problems, are in no hurry to clean up voter rolls.
By MATTHEW WAITE
Published May 19, 2004
Local elections supervisors say they will move cautiously before purging thousands of voters identified by the state as potential felons.
They don't want a repeat of the 2000 election, when hundreds of voters were wrongly identified as felons and barred from voting.
"I have no desire to move forward quickly," said Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark. "I would rather move forward cautiously. We've had enough bad experience with this project, with information that we have received, I'm just a bit skeptical, which is not bad."
But it's unclear how much scrutiny the lists will get.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the state over the 2000 purge of felons, wants elections supervisors to look up criminal records at local courthouses.
"It would be a mistake and it would be an evasion of a legal responsibility of county supervisors of elections just to act on the list of potential felons," said Florida ACLU executive director Howard Simon. "Don't remove anybody from the rolls unless there is some piece of paper with evidence on it that shows they are a convicted felon.
"We're dealing with the most fundamental right of the American system."
Some supervisors may go find paper records. Others could simply compare the list they get from state elections officials with a felons roster from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement before mailing letters informing voters that they have been flagged as potential felons.
Tampa Bay area supervisors said they are still sorting through the procedures they will follow.
But the letter is the only verification state law requires of local supervisors.
"I feel better about it in the sense that they have heightened the filter," said Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning. "If I'm arrested as a felon, what are the chances I'm going to give you my proper name? I could give you any name, and it's up to you to disprove it. It's like hitting a moving target. It's a tough job.
"Did we, the state, or us, do our job well the last time we did this? I don't think we did."
It's not a perfect system, elections officials say, and some felons could wind up voting after all.
"I'm really erring on the right to vote, there being something considerable before denying that right," said Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson. "At the end of the day, it's a judgment call in some cases. ... The matching process is not as empirical as it might appear."
Florida is one of a seven states that bar felons from voting unless they successfully petition to have their rights restored, a long and cumbersome process.
Because felons are disproportionately Democrats, critics said the improper purge in 2000 could have been a decisive factor in the presidential election, when 19,398 voters were purged because the state said they were felons.
Many of the voters who were improperly removed from voting rolls were from states that do not bar felons from voting.
This year, the state has flagged more than 47,000 of the state's roughly 9-million registered voters as potential felons.
In 2000, the state hired ChoicePoint, a computer database company, to identify felons. State officials said the company cast too wide a net, but the company said the state wanted a wide net.
State elections officials, led by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris, made little effort to verify ChoicePoint's list. Twenty elections supervisors ignored the list. But the rest simply purged their voter rolls without notifying voters.
Dozens of voters across Florida found out on election day that they could not vote.
This year, the state compiled its own list by comparing a statewide voter roll with a database of felony convictions compiled by FDLE. Each match is assigned a score, depending on the strength of the match.
To be flagged as a potential felon, the match has to score 50 points on an 80-point scale. Typos, nicknames, misspellings and data entry errors can affect the match.
But being flagged as a potential felon doesn't mean a voter is kicked off the list.
Each supervisor now has access to the FDLE and clemency board records used to match the voter file, as well as the match score. Elections workers can then review each record to verify the match.
But the only thing elections supervisors are required to do is mail a letter to voters informing them that they have been flagged as a potential felon, giving them the chance to challenge or correct information.
Local supervisors now have the list of potential felons, totaling nearly 7,000 in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties.
Pasco's Browning plans to mail letters in the coming weeks. Pinellas is still working on its procedures. Hillsborough plans to mail letters by June 15.
Citrus Elections Supervisor Susan Gill plans to tell voters "we do not know if the list is accurate, and we understand people may have the same last name."
The letter will include a form that asks voters to answer a series of questions: Are you a felon? Is this information correct? If you are a felon, were your rights restored?
Voters are warned that if they do not respond, their names will be published in the local newspaper, alerting them that they will be barred from voting unless they attend a public hearing and plead their case. But respondents will not automatically be guaranteed the right to vote.
If they do respond, they'll get a letter telling them whether they can.
Voters removed from the rolls can appeal during a hearing with the elections supervisor. Voters can then appeal to Circuit Court.
Purging 47,000 voters is nothing compared to the number routinely purged for not voting.
After every congressional election, federal election law calls for inactive voters to be purged from the list. For that to happen, a voter would have to skip four consecutive general elections, and several letters asking whether they still want to vote would have to have been returned as undeliverable.
It happens more than you might think.
In 2001, Hillsborough purged more than 33,000 inactive voters, and another 28,000 were purged in 2003. Pinellas purged 24,500 inactive voters in 2002. Pasco purged 7,171 voters after the 2000 election, nearly 10 times more than the number of potential felons flagged by the state this year.
