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Nelson to join CNN lawsuit against secret Florida purge list

(Links to today’s news stories blatantly stolen from Florida Politics, but the analysis is mine.)

Florida’s 2004 model super-secret felon purge list is drawing lots of attention, including a lawsuit by CNN with the support of the First Amendment Foundation and other groups. More lawsuits are being threatened by the ACLU and other interested parties. The lawsuits are in response to the state’s assertion that the list must be kept secret to protect the privacy of the voters.

Today, Senator Bill Nelson will announce that he is joining the CNN lawsuit against the state which seeks to open up the list to the Florida sunshine.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson is joining a lawsuit filed by CNN demanding that Florida election officials make public a state list of names of possible felons who are to be deleted from voters rolls.

Nelson will announce the filing of a "friend of the court" brief supporting the CNN suit today during a news conference in front of the Palm Beach County elections office.

"The list should be open to the public, because of the potential for mistakes," said Nelson in a prepared statement.

The state compiles lists of possible felons and gives the list to county election officials who then review the names to determine if there are any felons who must be removed from voter rolls. In the 2000 election, many potential voters around the state said they were prevented from voting because their names were incorrectly on the list.

Meanwhile, brother Jeb! has his cronies lining up to defend the withholding of public records.

It has been called dangerous, bizarre and even unconstitutional.

But a Florida law that legally prohibits individuals from copying or writing down names of the state's registered voters -- which is now being challenged in court -- is needed to protect voter privacy, state election officials and key state legislators insist.

Groups such as the NAACP, eager to avoid a repeat of problems in the 2000 presidential election in which thousands of people in Florida were mistakenly purged from voter rolls, have demanded state election officials release the names of more than 47,000 suspected felons who may not be allowed to vote this fall.

A lawsuit brought by television news giant CNN demanding the names also is set to be heard Wednesday before Leon Circuit Court Judge Nikki Clark. She is the judge who in 2000 ruled in favor of George W. Bush's demand to count disputed absentee ballots. Bush eventually captured the White House with just 537 votes more than Al Gore.

The ACLU of Florida also is considering joining the lawsuit. State elections officials have refused to release names of so-called "potential felons" -- who may be dropped from voting -- sent to county election supervisors, citing a 2001 elections law that prohibits giving such names to anyone but government agencies and officials, political candidates, parties or committees.

The 2001 state law does allow parties to get computer lists of voter data such as names and addresses but requires them to take an oath to keep the information confidential.

One state Democratic Party attorney calls the law "wacky." Other critics go much further.

"It's outrageous. I would think the Division of Elections would want as many people as possible to look at this list to make sure it's accurate before we start kicking people off the rolls in error like we did four years ago," said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, which already is joining the suit against the state.

State election officials defend the law, saying there's nothing wacky about it and secrecy is necessary to protect election data and Florida voters.

"To release that information would violate the privacy of those individuals," said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood. "The law says the information is not to be used for `commercial purposes,' and I think that's why it was drafted."

Nash said voters can go to any county election office and look at their information -- they just can't take any notes or copy names.

So, the republicans are saying that gee, they are just concerned with the privacy of the voter, but the law was designed specifically to protect voter rolls (the list is not a roll - it’s a list of people who are scheduled to be disenfranchised unless they fight to keep their right to vote) from being misused by commercial interests. It is not designed to keep this list out of the hands of the press.

Much more on Florida’s Felonious Junk purge list here.