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Felonious Junk: Lawsuits threatened over “secret” list

The First Amendment Foundation, an open government advocacy group, is threatening legal action if the State of Florida does not release a controversial list of “felons” to be scrubbed from the state voter rolls.

Calling it an issue of national importance, First Amendment advocates Monday formally demanded that Florida election officials release the names of nearly 50,000 possible felons who could be stripped from voter rolls. The group says it will likely file suit if the state refuses to provide a list.

"If they say no, chances are good," said First Amendment Foundation President Barbara Petersen, who sent a legal request Monday for the names. "This is critical not only to Florida but to the whole country. We don't want what happened in 2000 to happen again. This information is critical to public confidence."

What happened in 2000? I’m glad you asked. Florida, through the machinations of Katherine Harris and brother Jeb! contracted with a republican owned company to compile a database of suspected felons to be removed from Florida’s voting rolls. In Florida, ex-felons can’t legally vote, unless they get a special dispensation from the Governor.

There were a couple of problems with the2000 list. First, the list included out of state felons who had moved to Florida having had their voting rights restored in their home states. Jeb! had been told again and again that these ex-felons from out of state who now resided in Florida could not be denied the right to vote in Florida.

It has been well reported that Florida denies its nearly half a million former convicts the right to vote. However, the media have completely missed the fact that Florida's own courts have repeatedly told the Governor he may not take away the civil rights of Florida citizens who committed crimes in other states, served their time and had their rights restored by those states.

People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number "clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000," says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University. Manza estimates that 80 percent arrive with voting rights intact, which they do not forfeit by relocating to Florida.

Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor's office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, with the aid of a Republican-tied database firm, Harris's office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries.

Yes, this is an allusion to the 2000 list of felons. As well as illegally including known eligible voters from out of state, the list was designed to produce many false positives, thus creating an often insurmountable barrier to voting for many people who have never been accused of any wrong doing, much less convicted.

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.

Coincidentally, most of the people wrongly disenfranchised due to the faulty 2000 list were minorities. Go figure.

A lawsuit brought by the NAACP and other groups resulted in the state promising to tighten up “felon” lists in the future. The state also vowed to return the voters who were wrongly purged in 2000 to the rolls, but there is no deadline for the state to comply, and as of now, only half of Florida counties have followed up on a state request to inspect their rolls for possible problems.

Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far -- more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.

The fact that many counties have yet to add voters back to the rolls comes at the same time that election supervisors across Florida are being asked to look at purging more than 47,000 voters that the state has identified as possible felons who are ineligible to vote under state law.

NO DEADLINE

But state election officials say there is no deadline for when counties must reinstate voters who may have been wrongly removed four years ago. That upsets some of the groups that sued the state over its 1999 and 2000 purge lists.

''It's scandalous that the state has not simply undone the error that was done in 2000,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ``It calls into question this and so many other issues and makes you wonder, how much has really changed four years after the 2000 election?''

Well, not much has changed. As noted above, the 2004 list contains over 47,000 names, and the state is already pressuring county supervisors of elections to purge purge purge.

Which brings us up to date, more or less. The 2004 list is being hyped by the state as new and improved, but the state is refusing to allow inspections of the list, so no one really knows if it’s any better than the 2000 failure. Florida’s has fairly liberal open records laws, and the state constitution state constitution requires any law limiting public records to be passed as a separate bill, with a specific statement of why it's necessary.

The First Amendment Foundation maintains that the state is unlawfully extending an exemption for actual voter registration records to the list of possible felons.

The First Amendment Foundation is challenging a decision by the state's chief elections officer that the list not be made available to the general public.

"I'm sorry, but that list is suspect," foundation President Barbara Petersen said Wednesday. "I just can't understand, considering all of the trouble we went through four years ago, why they wouldn't want anyone else to help them verify it."

Petersen said she mailed and faxed a formal public-records request for the list on Monday, but a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood said Wednesday that the office had not received it.

In a May 12 memo to the 67 county supervisors of elections, however, Division of Elections Director Ed Kast mentioned a similar request by the civil rights group People for the American Way and cited two recent statutes that he said allow the public to view only voter registration records, without making copies or taking notes.

He noted, though, that the law does allow political parties, candidates and committees, and elected officials to obtain copies.

Petersen said one of the laws Kast cites is unconstitutional because it was not passed by the legislature as a separate exemption to the state constitution. Petersen also argues that the law applies to a voter registry, not the list of possible felons the state wants to remove from the registry.

Petersen said there is a good chance her group will file a lawsuit, but for now she has to wait.

"I really can't do anything until they respond to my request," she said. "Isn't it interesting that they can't find it?"

Florida elections officials sent the list to county elections supervisors early this month. The law requires supervisors to send certified letters to each person on the list and ask for verification. Recipients are entitled to an informal hearing. If officials get no response, they are required to follow up with an advertisement in a local newspaper. If there is still no response in 30 days, the name is purged from the rolls.
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Many changes have been made since the historic recount in 2000 that spawned scores of lawsuits and a U.S. Supreme Court decision anointing George W. Bush the winner with a 537-vote margin over Al Gore in Florida. Punch-card voting machines have been banned and the state has launched an unprecedented voter education drive.

But Florida remains one of a handful of states that deny felons the right to vote even after they have completed their sentences, forcing them to go before a clemency board to restore their civil rights.

State officials have pledged to put the list together more carefully as part of an agreement with the NAACP to settle a 2002 lawsuit challenging the flawed process from the 2000 election.

"Part of our settlement agreement with the NAACP in 2002 was that we develop a more stringent matching procedure, and they signed off on it," said Hood's spokeswoman, Jenny Nash. "There are a lot more checks and balances."

The checks and balances aren't enough to satisfy Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, which also is considering a lawsuit.

"We're asking the supervisors to do an independent verification," he said. "If all they do is send out the letters and adopt the state list, we would definitely consider going to court. That would just repeat the same tragedy."

To clarify, state law requires county elections supervisors to send a letter and print an ad at a minimum. Election supervisors are free to make a much stronger effort to avoid mistakes, and some will, but many, including Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson, plan to just follow the minimum guidelines. This puts the onus on the voter who is misidentified to have himself put back on the roles. Obviously, this is a huge impediment, especially to the working class minorities who are most likely to be affected.

So, right now, in Florida, there are 47,000 people who may soon be disenfranchised, and the state wont share those names with the public. Even as the state rushes to purge from this new list, thousands of people who were wrongly disenfranchised in 2000 remain in voting limbo due to the fact that Jeb! is in no hurry and under no legal obligation to put them back on the rolls in time for the November selection.

More information:

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First Amendment Foundation

Greg Palast