Since a flawed list of potential felons was scrapped, elections officials have relied on a longtime practice of checking court records for new felons to remove.
By Associated Press
Published October 9, 2004
MIAMI - About 2,000 new felons were removed from Florida election rolls since a controversial state database of ineligible voters was scrapped in July because it was flawed, but elections officials aren't reviewing old records to see if they may have missed anyone.
When the state bowed to criticism and discarded the flawed list of 48,000 potentially ineligible voters, local election officials continued what they had been doing for years - examining court records each month for new names to purge from voting rolls. They weren't required to make any other checks.
"We don't have the time or personnel to go back five years and check on the felony status of a voter," said Brenda Renfore, executive administrator for Escambia County elections. The county has purged 37 new felons from its rolls since July.
Pinellas County removed 267 voters based on a list of felons provided by the clerk of court. "Their information is accurate and that's the only information we use," said Pinellas Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark.
Hillsborough removed 200 names. Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson said state law requires him to purge felons when he learns of them. He regularly gets reports from the clerk of courts about felony convictions.
"We are not doing any purging beyond that," Johnson said.
Florida is one of a handful of states that do not automatically restore voting rights to felons when they complete their sentence. The purge by election officials has been a hot-button issue since the 2000 presidential election, in which some citizens discovered at the polls they had been erroneously stricken from voter rolls.
A company hired to identify ineligible voters before that election produced an error-filled list, and elections supervisors removed voters without verifying its accuracy. The state hired a new contractor to create another list that election supervisors were to use this year to screen felons whose voting rights weren't restored. That list was scrapped after revelations that it had a flaw that excluded Hispanic felons.
The Associated Press surveyed counties on their efforts to purge ineligible voters and received responses from 48 of the 67. Nine had not removed any voters from their rolls since the list was scrapped, including Miami-Dade, the second-largest county with more than 1-million registered voters.
"We follow the law, but within whatever flexibility we have, we always do whatever we can do to err on the side of the voter and ensure that our electorate is fully enfranchised," said Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the county's elections office. "We won't put someone in felon status until we can verify that they haven't received clemency."
In May, Secretary of State Glenda Hood released the list of people identified as potential felons who should be removed from the rolls because their voting rights weren't restored. Many supervisors had expressed concern about the accuracy of the list and some refused to remove voters.
Hood pulled the list July 10 after it was reported that a glitch resulted in the list's containing few Hispanics. Local elections officials were told to use their own system for making sure felons whose voting rights weren't restored were purged from their voting rolls.
Between July 1 and the end of September, more than 750 felons have been removed from the rolls in five of the state's 10 counties with the most registered voters: Hillsborough, Orange, Duval, Lee and Volusia.
"I don't think that's an insignificant number," said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "Any process that disenfranchises a single voter incorrectly is a process that is troubling."
On Election Day, voters who think they were mistakenly removed from voter rolls can use a provisional ballot. If the voter's eligibility is later confirmed, the ballot will be counted.
Times staff writer Curtis Krueger contributed to this report.
