BlogWood: MT Archives

Secrets of the Florida purge list revealed

Yesterday, a Florida judge granted CNN and other news and organizations the right to thoroughly inspect the Florida felon purge list.

In 2000, thousands of potential voters, mostly minority, and heavily Democrat, were wrongly scrubbed from the voter rolls in a misguided effort to comply with the Civil War reconstruction era law which still bars ex-felons who have paid their debt from voting in Florida. Florida is one of six states which still clings to this racist law.

Well, the news organizations have already started to crunch the numbers in the list and have found some interesting results.

The Tampa Tribune reports that the majority of the names on the list are of Democrats and minorities. No surprise there:

Florida's error-prone list of 47,763 suspected felons who could be tossed from voter rolls before November's presidential election contains nearly three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Almost half are racial minorities.

Although activists have speculated for months that most of the voters on the controversial list are likely Democrats, precise numbers were difficult to calculate because state law forbade releasing copies to the public.

That law, however, was overturned Thursday by a Leon County judge at the request of CNN and several other news organizations, including The Tampa Tribune.

Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark said in her ruling that the Florida Constitution ``grants every person the fundamental right to inspect or copy public records.'' Further, the state had previously allowed the public and news media to inspect the list and not make copies, but Clark cited previous state court rulings that said the public's access was ``valueless without the right to make copies.''

News organizations, advocacy groups and others argued that public release of the list would enable greater scrutiny so that mistakes could be identified and fixed before eligible voters are wrongly turned away at the polls, as they were in the 2000 presidential election. Already, several mistakes have been discovered statewide.
......

Among racial groups, the largest reported group was non-Hispanic whites with 24,197, followed by 22,084 non-Hispanic blacks, 1,384 unknowns, 61 Hispanics, 14 Asian or Pacific-Islanders, 12 American Indians and 11 others. The list consisted of 37,777 men and 9,986 women.

Meanwhile, the St. Pete. Times mentions that the list is so controversial that the state’s own laywer was not willing to defend it in court.

The felon list had few defenders. Even state Attorney General Charlie Crist, a Republican, questioned whether it made sense, and was hesitant about defending the law in court. Instead, the state hired a private firm to defend the law.

And the Miami Herald has already started to check names on the list, and has already found some troubling inconsistencies.

More than 2,100 Florida voters -- many of them black Democrats -- could be wrongly barred from voting in November because Tallahassee elections officials included them on a list of felons potentially ineligible to vote, a Herald investigation has found.

A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.

But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names -- including 547 in South Florida -- shouldn't be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process.

That's a potentially jarring flaw, critics say, in a state that turned the 2000 presidential election to Gov. Jeb Bush's brother George on the narrowest of margins -- 537 votes.

Transparency: what a concept.

Anyway, the list has only been available for about 16 hours now, and already tons of problems have been identified. Stay tuned for more outrage and unbelievable coincidence as these numbers are thoroughly vetted.

Thankfully, many of Florida’s county elections supervisors, who are ultimately in charge of the voter rolls in their respective counties, have been hesitant to make use of this list, and some are now saying that they may just throw the whole list out.

Counties must issue letters to voters who could be declared ineligible. Only those who can prove they're eligible to vote will be left on the rolls.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood said in a statement announcing the release of the information that it contains potential matches and is not a final list.

Some, including Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning, said it's possible that the process will prove lengthy and that no voters will be removed in their county before Nov. 2.

Felons, meanwhile, continue to be purged from voter rolls - sometimes improperly - because processes exist separate from the statewide list of potential felons.

The process may prove lengthy because the state has made the county supervisors responsible for checking every name on the list to make sure it should be there. With the Miami Herald finding 2000 false positives right off the bat, individual elections supervisors, with small staffs and no budget for the project, were being overwhelmed.

Pasco Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning said he expects to hire a private firm to review the list but is not sure how to pay for it.

"We're not equipped to do it ourselves," Browning said. "We don't know where to look or where to start to look."

TONS of background info here.