It's a good time for the Legislature to look into mistakes made by a private company that allowed ex-felons to vote, and then took that privilege away.

There was harrumphing from press and politicians over the post election discovery that some felons had gone to the polls Nov. 7 without having first had their civil rights restored. But that's not the worst that happened in that regard. It appears that some citizens were wrongly disenfranchised because of inaccurate data. Add that to the fix-it list from Florida's most malfunctioning election.

The errors originated with a private company hired by the elections division to match voter rolls against various other data bases to make sure that no one could vote twice and that the dead and ex-felons couldn't vote at all. But the company, DataBase Technologies, admits that its April list of 173,000 potentially ineligible voters mistakenly included the names of some 8,000 people who had committed misdemeanors in Texas. DBT caught its own error and sent a revised list to the state, which forwarded it to county election supervisors in June. By then, however, some supervisors had purged voters without notice or opportunity to contest the finding. The first they knew of it was when they went to the polls Nov. 7 and were told they couldn't vote.

This inexcusable laxity contributed to the post election suspicions voiced by the Legislature's Black Caucus and other African-Americans who have demanded a major voting-rights investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. Their concerns deserve a full and forthright response. Florida cannot afford to let this issue fester.

DBT was hired in November 1998 -- on former Secretary of State Sandra Mortham's watch -- to sift voter rolls for people who had died, who had been convicted of felonies and had not had their voting rights restored, or who had moved between counties without having their earlier registrations canceled. The Legislature properly ordered this done after the courts had to toss a fraud-ridden Miami mayoral election three years ago.

But the Legislature, which stipulated that the job be contracted to private companies, plainly has follow-up work to do. Among the questions it should be asking:

Considering that DBT was paid more than $4-million primarily to process information to be supplied by the state, was that perhaps a bit much? Did the prominent Republican connections of ChoicePoint Inc., the company into which DBT was merged this year, contribute to a lack of appropriate oversight?

Given that the law requires voter lists to be combed annually, why shouldn't the work be done in-house? Why give it to private companies that insist on immunity from secondary liability?

Which election supervisors defaulted on their legal duty to verify DBT's findings, and which, if any, ignored the corrected list?

What does it say to the governor's Privacy Task Force about the accuracy of the massive, intrusive data bases maintained by government and private companies like ChoicePoint?

Is it still appropriate for the Florida Constitution to disenfranchise everyone convicted of a felony, here or elsewhere, even after they have served their sentences? A pending suit links this persuasively to the various schemes of post-Civil War legislatures to keep newly freed slaves from voting. To this day, blacks are disproportionately disenfranchised.

In their capacity as the clemency board, Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet have made decent progress in streamlining the restoration of voting rights, but more remains to be done. At the very least, applicants whom the board wants to question shouldn't always have to travel to Tallahassee. They should be able to plead by teleconferencing or when the Cabinet meets elsewhere in the state.

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