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Election 2004
No telling if voter rolls are ready for 2004
In 2000, some people were mistakenly labeled felons and denied voting rights. Despite three years of reform efforts, inconsistencies and obstacles remain.
By ADAM C. SMITH
Published December 21, 2003
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David Murry had regularly voted for 20 years, so the mechanic didn't think twice when he showed up at his Seminole precinct in November 2000 to vote for president.
But poll workers wouldn't let him cast a ballot.
Murry was a felon, they said, and they brushed aside his protests that their records were wrong. The apologetic letter he later received from the Pinellas County elections office acknowledging the mistake offered little solace.
"This was a presidential election. It was very important," Murry recalled last week. "I never did anything to deserve it, but they denied me my constitutional right to vote."
How many voters were incorrectly removed from voter rolls before the 2000 election remains unclear. The controversy spawned conspiracy theories, lawsuits and election-reform efforts, including a more accurate method for flagging illegal voters.
But less than a year before Floridians vote again for president, the election system remains bedeviled by inconsistencies, red tape and potential obstacles to prospective voters:
The state put together a list of 12,000 people - 41 percent of whom are African-American - who may have been misidentified as felons and denied the right to vote in 2000. But after completing the list, elections officials acknowledge it is inexact and still may include felons who should not be allowed to vote in 2004.
The counties have been told to deal with inconsistencies in the list as best they can. Some are returning to the rolls any voters who the county can't prove are felons. But others are making voters prove they aren't felons in order to vote next year.
Despite a legal settlement to make it easier for felons to regain their voting rights, the backlog of former prisoners who have applied to restore their rights has grown to nearly 39,000. That's a six-fold increase since 2001, yet the state earlier this year cut the number of Parole Commission staffers who handle applications.
In 2004, could Florida voters again be wrongfully denied their voting rights?
"I don't know that I can answer that," said Secretary of State Glenda Hood, whom Gov. Jeb Bush appointed to succeed Katherine Harris as the state's top elections official.
Attorney Cara Fineman of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, one of several groups that sued the state for disenfranchising minority voters in 2000, said "I don't think any of us would feel comfortable saying it's fixed. I think the Division of Elections is moving in the right direction."
The problems exposed in the 2000 election prompted the state to ease off its aggressive purge of suspected illegal voters for the 2002 gubernatorial election. But state elections officials say they're employing a better process with more stringent rules for identifying felons who are registered to vote and will be ready for the Aug. 31 primary.
"There's still a bit of testing to go through, but we're very, very close to having it fixed," said Division of Elections director Ed Kast.
Some local elections administrators are skeptical.
"What we got in 2000 was a mess. It was a free-for-all," said Indian River County Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem, who heads the state association of elections supervisors. "I don't know what it's going to take to make a lot of us feel comfortable with it this time."
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/12/21/State/No_telling_if_voter_r.shtml
Voter role purge in the 2000 Florida election
Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush hired Database Technologies to purge 82,389 voters whose names matched or were similar to those of ex-felons. An investigation by Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho revealed that 95% of those purged in his county were, in fact, legally entitled to vote. Greg Palast of the BBC found that more than half those wrongly purged were African-Americans, even though African-Americans represent only about 11% of the electorate and that the purge list contained almost no Hispanics, notwithstanding Florida’s sizable Hispanic population. (In Florida, Hispanics vote mostly Republican, and African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic.) [15]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Voter_role_purge_in_the_2000_Florida_election
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