June 08, 2004
Felonious Junk: Florida elections chief resigns over purge list
Officially, he’s leaving for personal reasons. A few months before the presidential election. But this has nothing to do with the Florida felon purge list. Really. Nothing at all: (AP)
Less than five months before the Nov. 2 election, veteran elections official Ed Kast is quitting his job overseeing the state's voting machinery. Secretary of State Glenda Hood named the agency's top lawyer, Dawn Roberts, to replace him.Kast said he'd been thinking about moving on to pursue other interests for some time and thought the Division of Elections had plenty of time to get ready for Election Day under new leadership.
......Kast, 53, said he wasn't resigning because of any problems at the agency but simply wanted to pursue other interests after working at the Department of State since 1994.
"I just thought that this was the time to do it," Kast said. "I'm not getting any younger."
The South Florida Sun-Sentinal posits a slightly more believable scenario:
The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls.Ed Kast, who has worked for the state elections division for more than a decade, said only that he was resigning to "pursue other opportunities."
But Kast has told a handful of associates that he was uncomfortable with growing pressure to trim felons from voter rolls in time for the fall election, friends say.
"I've known him for 20 years, and I believe he has acted because under the circumstances it's the only thing he could do," said Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, past president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
"Ed had made a number of comments that the nature and timing of this felons list was not something he was responsible for. I think he felt in good conscience he could no longer be involved in the operations."
Hours earlier, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson joined a lawsuit to force state election officials to reveal the names of 47,000 suspected felons who could be dropped from voting lists, saying he wanted to be sure mistakes in 2000 are not repeated.
"This year, Ohio and Florida are looked upon as the two states that could decide the presidential election and we just can't go through this again," the Florida Democrat said.
In the 2000 election, which President Bush won after taking Florida by 537 votes over Al Gore, there were accusations that thousands were wrongly disenfranchised when the state purged the voter roles of suspected felons.
Even a former state Republican Party executive called Kast's resignation "very strange."
"The timing is very suspicious," said Geoffrey Becker, now a GOP consultant. "I know there's a lot of concern about getting out the message that voting is OK this time."
Kast's sudden resignation was the No. 1 topic for county election supervisors from around the state who gathered Monday in Key West for a five-day meeting, a conference where Kast is scheduled to appear.
......Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who accepted Kast's resignation, did not return messages.
Hood named Dawn Roberts, the agency's attorney and a former legislative election specialist, to replace Kast.
Groups who have criticized the felon purge efforts seized on the announcement within minutes.
"It's a sign of serious disarray and instability," said Sharon Lettman, state director for People For the American Way Foundation.
More from PFAW here.
The timing issue was just starting to bubble to the surface. It’s been crowded out by the secrecy issue
and the protocol issue and the reinstatement issue and the application for restoration of rights issue and...
