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Report: Advice to pull felons list ignored
TALLAHASSEE - Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice from leery state officials to "pull the plug" on a flawed felon voters list before it went out to county election offices, according to a published report over the weekend.
Computer experts in the Department of State and Florida Department of Law Enforcement were concerned about the software program that matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the purge list of 48,000 names, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.
Jeff Long, a computer expert with the FDLE, told his supervisor in a May 4 e-mail that Paul Craft, the Department of State's point man on the purge list, had recommended it be scrapped.
"The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're "going live' with it this weekend," Long wrote in an e-mail obtained by the newspaper after a public records request.
Two months later, Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database after acknowledging that 2,500 people on the list had their voting rights restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black.
Also, Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list because of an error when the two state databases were merged.
Florida is one of a handful of states that do not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons when they complete their sentence. The purge of felons by election officials has been a hot-button issue since the 2000 presidential election, when many citizens discovered at the polls they weren't allowed to vote.
Bush told the newspaper Friday he was never warned about any problems before the list was released. His spokeswoman, Jill Bratina, said Saturday the allegation that Bush ignored warnings was "absolutely false."
Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Hood, said Craft never made recommendations to Bush about the purge list. She added that Long's e-mail dealt with "a specific component with the central voter database that had nothing to do with the reliability of the original data source."
U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Florida chairman of John Kerry's presidential campaign, said the report shows how far Bush is willing to go to ensure his brother's re-election.
U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., and the voter rights organization People for the American Way Foundation both said Long's message proves Bush had ties to the flawed effort to purge felons.