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Felonious Junk: Jeb!’s office delays rights restoration

A pleasant surprise from a conservative paper: The Tribune’s William March has been covering Florida “felon” purge list story pretty well. Today’s paper has another March article on this developing travesty, and a few new points are brought to light.

First, March clears up some confusion (mentioned here on BlogWood) over what Hillsborough elections supervisor and Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson has accomplished to date as regards the purge list.

March’s article states that Johnson has asserted that he has reinstated the 533 Hillsborough County residents who were wrongly purged from the list in 2000. Good. That only took 4 years. (Yes - that’s 533 in Hillsborough alone, just one county in a state which Bush officially “won” with just over 500 votes.)

It remains to be seen how Buddy is going to handle the 2004 list. My fear is that he will follow the letter of the law and do the least he is required and no more. In fact, Jeb!’s buddy Buddy has the power to influence a close statewide election, and decisions made now on this year’s purge list will affect the outcome.

Another new revelation made in the March article is the fact that the Tampa Tribune may be joining the lawsuit brought by CNN to force the state to turn over the names on the 2004 purge list. Jeb! appointee Glenda Hood, Florida’s Secretary of State, is asserting that a law designed to protect the voter rolls from predatory commercial interests legally bars her from sharing the list with news and other organizations.

March also questions the timing of the release of the 2004 list, asking why it’s coming out so close to the election:

Hood said the statewide voter list required by the 2001 reform law was finished on time, in May 2002. But settling the NAACP lawsuit and devising the new matching criteria delayed production of the felon purge list until now, she said.

She said the names are considered ``potential matches,'' which the supervisor must check for accuracy.

``A supervisor is going to make absolutely certain that the name should be removed,'' and won't ``unless they have absolute proof,'' she said.

That means this year's process will be different from 2000, said State Department spokeswoman Jenny Nash, because the burden of proof is on the supervisor to make sure the voter is a felon, not on the voter to prove innocence.

But the supervisors themselves aren't so sure.

Deciding whether a voter has a criminal record can be a tricky investigative task, involving names, Social Security numbers and birth dates that are similar but don't quite match, and checks of state or nationwide criminal records.

``I'm trying to figure out by what authority, why we have to investigate this list of people,'' Browning said. ``It's not my job. I'm not an investigator. I don't know what I'm doing with this stuff.''

Other supervisors, including Ion Sancho of Leon County, have said they don't have the staff or money for investigations or the mailings or advertisements intended to notify affected voters.

According to instructions published on the State Department Web site, if a voter fails to respond to a letter within 30 days, the supervisor is required to remove the name from the list. Browning said that appears to leave the burden of proof on the voter, just as in 2000. ``I'm trying to figure out what's different,'' he said.

``If I got a letter saying you might be a felon, I'm not going to let that sit,'' Browning said. But some may not respond because of address changes, misunderstanding or other errors.

``For whatever reason, the assumption is that if they don't respond, maybe they are a felon,'' he said.

Most important, though, is the revelation that the restoration of rights for ex-felons who, according to the racist law by which we live, were legally removed from the rolls. The NAACP sued the state over the 2000 election problems, and the Governor’s office promised to mail out forms to all ex-felons so that they could easily apply to have their civil rights restored.

The process of restoration of civil rights includes a bizarre ritual in which supplicants must personally plead to The Emperor Jeb! for forgiveness, but not too many people are getting anywhere near that point in the process, since Jeb’s Republican pals in the legislature conveniently failed to budget for an increase in staff to handle to flood of applications:

Derek Graham, Willie Johnson and Jeffrey Key, who are black and of Tampa, were three of the thousands of people legally removed from the voter rolls in 2000. They have past felony records and hadn't had their rights restored.

But all three also say they had been registered, and voting, for years before being turned away in 2000.

``When they release you, they don't tell you that you have to go through a process to receive those rights back,'' said Key, 40, a Progress Village homeowner with two grown children, one in college.
......

Graham, 38, who operates a street sweeper for the city of Tampa, remembers voting for the Community Investment Tax in 1996. It has been 17 years since the drug possession charge landed him an eight-month sentence. He applied 10 months ago to have his rights restored. He hasn't heard back.

Graham and Johnson are among 43,847 Floridians waiting to have their rights restored as of June 30, 2003.

That number has gone up from 6,437 in June 2001. As part of the settlement of litigation prompted by the 2000 election, the state sent restoration applications to thousands of former felons, which swamped the Executive Clemency Office staff.

Spokeswoman Jane Tillman said the office hoped the number would decline this year, but that depended on the Legislature approving 20 new positions for investigators. It didn't.

The applicants may have a long wait.

David Scott Stiles of Dover, 34, a truck driver, registered to vote - legally, he thought - after getting out of prison for motorcycle theft in 1998. In 2000, he was purged.

Stiles applied for rights restoration in September 2002 but was just told, nearly two years later, that his case won't be acted on in time for him to vote this year.

``I'm a felon, I screwed up, but I paid for what I did,'' he said. ``Now it's time for the state to do what they're supposed to do.''

See the rest of the article for a good brief overview of our current purge list follies. See BlogWood for more in depth background and analysis.