Election 2004

Many felons likely to cast ballots

Without a statewide list, local elections officials will continue to comb criminal records to remove felons from the voting rolls.

By MATTHEW WAITE, STEVE BOUSQUET and CRAIG PITTMAN, Times staff writers
Published July 13, 2004

Thousands of felons will likely cast ballots this fall now that Florida abandoned a flawed statewide list of potential felons who might be registered voters.

The prospect concerns Gov. Jeb Bush.

"There are a lot of people who shouldn't be voting who are and that will continue on this year, just as it has in the past," he predicted Monday.

After scrapping a flawed list of more than 47,000 potential felons Saturday, state elections officials have no plans to create another list this year. The challenge of identifying felons and removing them from the voting rolls now falls entirely on county election supervisors. They say they will continue to weed out felons by relying on county court records as they have for decades, a process that fails to catch thousands of felons in Florida's transient population.

State officials remain split along party lines over whether the situation demands any action in Tallahassee.

Democrats say the law requiring felons to get their right to vote restored by a clemency board is flawed. They say Bush should grant automatic clemency to all felons, but he opposes that approach.

Republicans leaders say the system works fine and doesn't require changes.

"It's a very partisan issue," said incoming state Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon. "The perception out there among Republicans is that most felons are Democrats."

Of the more than 47,000 names on the state's list of potential felons, more than 28,000 are registered Democrats and fewer than 10,000 are Republicans. That fueled Democratic criticism that the felons list was politically motivated, which Republicans deny.

This was the second time Florida tried to create a statewide database of felons who should not be voting, and both were plagued with problems.

Losing the state list didn't faze local elections officials.

"I didn't have a spasm with any of this," Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson said. "We just continued to do our work and we'll keep on continuing our work."

Local elections officials regularly comb criminal court records, a longstanding method. Hillsborough County, for example, has booted 688 felons off the voter rolls this year. Pinellas has ousted about 600.

Attorney General Charlie Crist even questioned the need for a state list of felons. The 2002 election ran just fine without one, he said.

The Aug. 31 primaries and Nov. 2 general elections will have to do without as well. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees elections statewide, scrapped the list of potential felons Saturday over concerns that it was too flawed to use. It will not be replaced this year.

Bush called the list "a tool" for supervisors to use, not the final arbiter.

The governor conceded that some people on the list should not be barred from voting, but said that "doesn't imply that the list was in error."

But the list, created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records, overlooked Hispanics, who frequently vote Republican.

Hispanics comprised a tenth of 1 percent of the list, though nearly 1 in 5 Floridians are Hispanic. While there were other flaws, the lack of Hispanic names prompted Hood to kill the list.

Florida is one of seven states that bars felons from voting unless their rights have been restored, a prohibition that dates back to 1868 and is rooted in efforts to keep ex-slaves from voting. Repeated efforts to amend the state Constitution to automatically restore felons' voting rights have failed.

Bush does not favor changing the system.

"He wants to make it as difficult as possible for people who might vote Democratic to vote," contended state Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox. But Republican leaders say they are more concerned with victims' rights than felons' rights.

The current approach grew out of a 1997 political scandal over a race between Joe Carollo and incumbent Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez. Carollo won at the polls but lost in the absentee ballot count, so he sued.

A two-week trial produced evidence of forged ballots, improperly witnessed ballots, even one vote cast by a dead man. The courts tossed out all 4,500 absentee ballots, handing Carollo the victory.

The Miami Herald found that 105 felons had been allowed to cast ballots. State lawmakers concluded that county elections officials could not be trusted, so they passed a law requiring state elections officials come up with a list of felons.

"I think the motive was good," said Jack Latvala, a former Republican state senator from Palm Harbor who sponsored the 1998 law. "The implementation maybe hasn't been as good as it should have been."

State officials spent $4-million hiring a private company to generate lists of potential duplicate registrants, dead people and felons.

They told the company to use very broad search terms, which led to thousands of incorrect names winding up on the list for the 2000 presidential election. Meanwhile, felons who were not screened out still got to cast ballots in that election, in which George Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes to take Florida - and thus win the Electoral College vote while losing the popular vote.

Democratic complaints about the flawed potential felon list in the 2000 election have been revived lately by filmmaker Michael Moore's anti-Bush film Fahrenheit 9/11, the governor noted Monday.

"The 2000 election, all this stuff about how we restricted - there's this Michael Moore conspiracy to restrict people that had the right to vote," the governor said. "I guarantee you, there's a lot more people that are felons that are voting. Many of whom, by the way, don't know that they're doing anything wrong."

After 2000, the Legislature told the Division of Elections to produce a new list, preferably with the help of the county elections supervisors and court clerks. But state elections officials spurned the help of county officials - even though the court clerks already had a statewide computer system set up for child support collection that could have been converted for use with voter roll checks, said Ron Labasky, an attorney for the Florida Association of Supervisors of Elections.

Compiling a perfect voter roll is an unattainable goal, some experts say.

Jessie Allen, associate counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which has challenged the constitutionality of the ban on felons voting, said the problems won't go away.

"It's really starting to look like an insoluble problem," Allen said. "It's impossible to administer without putting eligible voters at risk."

Staff writers Anita Kumar and Lucy Morgan and researchers John Martin and Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.

[Last modified July 13, 2004, 15:21:27]