zimv20
Jun 7, 2004, 04:48 PM
link (http://news.tbo.com/news/MGB7TQUZ5VD.html)
Florida is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons from voting unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of having their rights restored.
That law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000 presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly thousands of voters - no one knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls in 2000, some wrongly, because of errors in a state ``purge list'' of former felons.
Today, as the 2004 election nears:
* More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking.
* Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls.
* A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional and affects up to 600,000 people.
Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again.
Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000.
Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.
The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic.
In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.
Another post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter criteria in producing its felon purge lists.
The lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In 2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names as possible, even knowing it would result in ``false positives'' - people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former counsel of the Division of Elections.
They relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches before removing the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to complete the task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent letters to everyone on their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or couldn't provide proof they weren't felons.
That resulted in many people being wrongly removed; no one knows how many. Under the litigation settlement, each county is supposed to report completion of its efforts to find and re-register those wrongly removed. Only 33 of the 67 counties have done so.
Florida is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons from voting unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of having their rights restored.
That law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000 presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly thousands of voters - no one knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls in 2000, some wrongly, because of errors in a state ``purge list'' of former felons.
Today, as the 2004 election nears:
* More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking.
* Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls.
* A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional and affects up to 600,000 people.
Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again.
Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000.
Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.
The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic.
In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.
Another post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter criteria in producing its felon purge lists.
The lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In 2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names as possible, even knowing it would result in ``false positives'' - people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former counsel of the Division of Elections.
They relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches before removing the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to complete the task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent letters to everyone on their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or couldn't provide proof they weren't felons.
That resulted in many people being wrongly removed; no one knows how many. Under the litigation settlement, each county is supposed to report completion of its efforts to find and re-register those wrongly removed. Only 33 of the 67 counties have done so.
