Group wants felon voter list made public

By Jim Ash, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Thursday, May 27, 2004

TALLAHASSEE Hoping to prevent the same mistakes that barred thousands of Floridians from the voting booth in the 2000 election, civil rights advocates are threatening to go to court.

At issue is the state's new and improved computer list of 47,000 possible felons who could be denied the right to vote this year.

The First Amendment Foundation is challenging a decision by the state's chief elections officer that the list not be made available to the general public.

"I'm sorry, but that list is suspect," foundation President Barbara Petersen said Wednesday. "I just can't understand, considering all of the trouble we went through four years ago, why they wouldn't want anyone else to help them verify it."

Petersen said she mailed and faxed a formal public-records request for the list on Monday, but a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood said Wednesday that the office had not received it.

In a May 12 memo to the 67 county supervisors of elections, however, Division of Elections Director Ed Kast mentioned a similar request by the civil rights group People for the American Way and cited two recent statutes that he said allow the public to view only voter registration records, without making copies or taking notes.

He noted, though, that the law does allow political parties, candidates and committees, and elected officials to obtain copies.

Petersen said one of the laws Kast cites is unconstitutional because it was not passed by the legislature as a separate exemption to the state constitution. Petersen also argues that the law applies to a voter registry, not the list of possible felons the state wants to remove from the registry.

Petersen said there is a good chance her group will file a lawsuit, but for now she has to wait.

"I really can't do anything until they respond to my request," she said. "Isn't it interesting that they can't find it?"

Florida elections officials sent the list to county elections supervisors early this month. The law requires supervisors to send certified letters to each person on the list and ask for verification. Recipients are entitled to an informal hearing. If officials get no response, they are required to follow up with an advertisement in a local newspaper. If there is still no response in 30 days, the name is purged from the rolls.

Martin County is preparing to send 345 certified letters to the registered voters whose names appear on the list, Deputy Clerk Amy Kirkland said.

"We're just starting the process right now," Kirkland said Wednesday. "I'm not doing anything to take anyone's name off until we get responses. It's a very touchy situation."

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore will have to check 5,255 names, and St. Lucie County has 909 voters' names on the state list. LePore and St. Lucie Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker were unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Many changes have been made since the historic recount in 2000 that spawned scores of lawsuits and a U.S. Supreme Court decision anointing George W. Bush the winner with a 537-vote margin over Al Gore in Florida. Punch-card voting machines have been banned and the state has launched an unprecedented voter education drive.

But Florida remains one of a handful of states that deny felons the right to vote even after they have completed their sentences, forcing them to go before a clemency board to restore their civil rights.

State officials have pledged to put the list together more carefully as part of an agreement with the NAACP to settle a 2002 lawsuit challenging the flawed process from the 2000 election.

"Part of our settlement agreement with the NAACP in 2002 was that we develop a more stringent matching procedure, and they signed off on it," said Hood's spokeswoman, Jenny Nash. "There are a lot more checks and balances."

The checks and balances aren't enough to satisfy Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, which also is considering a lawsuit.

"We're asking the supervisors to do an independent verification," he said. "If all they do is send out the letters and adopt the state list, we would definitely consider going to court. That would just repeat the same tragedy."

The list became necessary in 1998 when state lawmakers decided to weed out felons and other ineligible voters after a 1997 Miami mayoral election was overturned because votes had been cast by the convicted and the dead.

Unlike the list for the 2000 election, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement provided the names to supervisors this year. They are checked against information at the Office of Executive Clemency and Office of Vital Statistics. No out-of-state information is used.

In 2000, the list came from Database Technologies Inc., then based in Boca Raton. The company had a $3.3 million two-year state contract to review national and state databases to produce a list of 42,389 "probable" and "possible" felons before the 2000 election. The company later became a subsidiary of ChoicePoint of Atlanta.

At least 1,100 eligible voters in Florida were wrongly purged from the rolls before the election, and more than 3,000 felons were not prevented from casting ballots, according to a Palm Beach Post computer analysis. The felons were allowed to vote largely because elections supervisors in 20 counties, including Palm Beach County, said they ignored the list, skeptical of its accuracy.