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May 16, 2004

Felonious junk: Florida's voter purges are back

A recent piece in The Nation by Greg Palast brings memories of disenfranchisement rushing back:

On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.

First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American.

Here in Tampa, we may well be in dire trouble. Former Hillsborough County elections supervisor Pam Iorio was wary of the year 2000 Florida felon list, and used it very carefully.

Hillsborough County's elections supervisor, Pam Iorio, tried to make sure that that the bugs in the system didn't keep anyone from voting. All 3,258 county residents who were identified as possible felons on the central voter file sent by the state in June were sent a certified letter informing them that their voting rights were in jeopardy. Of that number, 551 appealed their status, and 245 of those appeals were successful. Some had been convicted of a misdemeanor and not a felony, others were felons who had had their rights restored and others were simply cases of mistaken identity.

An additional 279 were not close matches with names on the county's own voter rolls and were not notified. Of the 3,258 names on the original list, therefore, the county concluded that more than 15 percent were in error. If that ratio held statewide, no fewer than 7,000 voters were incorrectly targeted for removal from voting rosters.

Iorio says local officials did not get adequate preparation for purging felons from their rolls. "We're not used to dealing with issues of criminal justice or ascertaining who has a felony conviction," she said. Though the central voter file was supposed to facilitate the process, it was often more troublesome than the monthly circuit court lists that she had previously used to clear her rolls of duplicate registrations, the deceased and convicted felons. "The database from the state level is not always accurate," Iorio said. As a consequence, her county did its best to notify citizens who were on the list about their felony status. "We sent those individuals a certified letter, we put an ad in a local newspaper and we held a public hearing. For those who didn't respond to that, we sent out another letter by regular mail," Iorio said. "That process lasted several months."

As a result, less people in Hillsborough County were disenfranchised than in many other Florida counties. Now, though, new elections supervisor Buddy Johnson, appointed by Jeb Bush to serve the remainder of Pam Iorio’s term when she resigned to run for Mayor of Tampa, seems eerily sanguine about the state of the state’s new list.

"What the state is doing is building a central voter registration database, so all the registration information is going into a central repository run by the state," said Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson.

"If someone was convicted of a felony in Pasco, served their time, got out of jail, and moved to Hillsborough and registered to vote, without a central system, the process of getting information was at best archaic and slow.

"I feel pretty comfortable with what they did."

So, Buddy feels comfortable that the state is being thorough and is not likely to let any of those wily felons sneak in and vote. Thankfully, not all of Florida’s county elections supervisors are as trusting as Buddy. From OrlandoSentinel (link via Florida Politics):

The state's push to remove thousands of "potential felons" from voter rolls is causing angst among local election officials, who worry about inaccurate information, unfair results and yet another round of election-year lawsuits.

Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles, who has almost 2,200 potential felons to verify, said computer data supplied to counties by the state is riddled with problems, including wrong names and criminal charges that may have been reduced.

Under state law, it is county election officials, not the state, who must verify convictions and notify people who would be dropped from voter rolls.

"You have to sift through it all -- and that comes down to us," said Cowles, a Democrat. "We become the one who needs to face the voter."

State officials have identified nearly 50,000 voters as "potential felons" who could be stripped from voter lists -- many of them Democrats and minorities who could swing an election in a state where Republicans and Democrats are roughly equal in number.

For some, the voter purge stirs unpleasant memories of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, when thousands of voters were dropped, in some cases based on flawed lists of convictions.

Cowles vows to carefully examine potential felons "individual by individual," and to "err on the side of caution." But in some cases, he said it will come down to voters themselves proving they're eligible to vote.
......

Florida already has more felons barred from voting than any state -- more than 400,000. And it is one of a handful of states that doesn't automatically restore civil rights to prisoners who finish sentences.

Felons are banned for life from voting unless they go through a long process of applying to have their right to vote restored and appearing before a state clemency board.

It took almost two years and "a lot of pushing" to regain the right to vote for Cindy Adkins of Seminole County, who won executive clemency. But she worries she could show up on a state list and be stripped from voting again.

"Even though I've re-registered, and I have my voter card, once you're in the spin cycle, you're always beat up," said Adkins, a longtime Republican. "I think I will always be blacklisted."

She said she's had trouble landing a good job since she was convicted of felony drug charges.

"I'm from a good family," she said. "But just because I got a little screwed up in the '80s, they treat me like I'm trailer trash."

Uh, yeah... ‘cause if you weren’t a good Republican, you would deserve te be treated like shit, but you are a card carrying Republican, and from a good family, so you shouldn’t be treated like some common crackhead. You were probably just popping pills. You are different and obviously superior to the low class losers who shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

So Cindy will probably get to cast a ballot this November, and it will probably even count. Wow, maybe she is superior white.... (back to Palast)

If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices.

Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population.

At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they aren't.

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count.

Posted by Norwood at May 16, 2004 02:08 PM
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