Hood wants investigation of felon database

The secretary of state "wants to find out why" information used to remove felons from voting lists was riddled with errors.

By LUCY MORGAN
Published July 16, 2004

TALLAHASSEE - Secretary of State Glenda Hood has ordered an audit of a controversial database that was supposed to remove felons from voting lists.

A spokeswoman for Hood said she has no reason to think there are additional problems with the list, which has been scrapped because it was filled with errors.

"She just wants to find out why it happened and why it wasn't caught until now," said director of communications Nicole de Lara.

In a letter to director of auditing Kathryn Parker, Hood urged her to schedule the audit immediately. She said she wants to determine whether the methods used to generate the list of potential felons comply with a settlement the state reached in 2002 with the NAACP and others who filed suit over a similar list generated during the 2000 election.

An undetermined number of voters were turned away from the polls in 2000 after they were erroneously listed as felons. The lawsuit against the state emerged after President Bush won by 537 votes.

This year the state spent $1.8-million developing a central data base required by law. The work was done by Accenture, a company with close ties to Republican officials. De Lara said the expenditure was made for the entire database, which includes the names of all Florida voters.

"We can't single out the amount spent for the felon component," she said.

The list of possible felons has been at the center of a controversy since May, when Hood distributed it to elections supervisors in each of Florida's 67 counties but refused to make it public.

CNN and other news organizations filed suit against Hood and won the right to obtain the list. Several newspapers found errors in the list, which mistakenly identified some people as felons and failed to identify other felons. It also omitted the names of thousands of Hispanics with felony convictions.

Hood spent about $150,000 on lawyers in an attempt to keep the list secret. A week after it was made public, Hood decided against using the list because of the errors discovered by news organizations.

Democrats have criticized Hood and Gov. Jeb Bush, accusing them of attempting to use the list to eliminate voters who would cast their ballots for Democrats.

Earlier this week state lawmakers called on Bush and Hood to eliminate the entire voting list because of errors.

The central list of voters is required by state and federal law as part of an effort to curtail vote fraud and eliminate people who may have registered to vote in more than one county.

[Last modified July 16, 2004, 01:19:09]