Posted on Fri, Jul. 02, 2004
Thousands of eligible voters are on felon list BY ERIKA BOLSTAD, JASON GROTTO AND DAVID KIDWELL
dkidwell@herald.com
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.
Florida -- one of just six states that don't allow felons to vote -- has come under intense criticism over its botched attempts to purge felons since the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, when myriad problems prompted many elections officials to ignore the purge altogether.
The new list is causing its own problems, raising more questions about the fairness and accuracy of the state's efforts to purge the voter rolls of ineligible voters.
State elections officials acknowledge there may be mistakes on the list but insist they have built in safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed by local election offices. They say they have warned election offices to be diligent before eliminating voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters on the list may have regained their rights.
''We have been very clear that this database is not to be considered the final word,'' Paul Craft, chief of the division's bureau of voting systems, said Thursday. ``We have told the local supervisors they need to be very careful with it.''
INCREASES RISKS
Yet local officials, already overburdened preparing for the election, say shifting the burden to them is opening the door for major problems.
''I have never seen such an incompetent program implemented by the DOE,'' said Leon County elections chief Ion Sancho.
Sancho said his office has already found people in the state's felon voter database who have received clemency.
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan said she, too, intends to err on the side of voters.
''This concerns me,'' Kaplan said of The Herald's findings. ``That's why I'm not having my staff jump to start any process until we can make 100 percent sure that it is the correct person.''
Craft said his office continuously checks the database against a list of felons who have received clemency -- which includes the right to vote -- and that 10,000 felons have already been taken off the list because of the clemency match.
Craft and other elections officials on Thursday declined to discuss why The Herald found another 2,119 voters in the database who have received clemency.
''We can't speculate on the methodology you used,'' Craft said. ``It is a matter that requires further investigation.''
CLOSE SCRUTINY
Elections officials said some voters with clemency could have been left on the list because records show they registered to vote before their rights were restored.
Dawn Roberts, director of the Division of Elections, said the process used to clean the voter rolls has been ''vetted at the highest levels of the Department of Justice'' and negotiated with civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.
Those assurances offered scant consolation to Mary Catherine Lane, 51, of Miami, who was 18 when she was arrested for robbery in 1972.
''That just makes me angry,'' Lane, a registered Democrat, said when told she was on the list.
''I got a pardon on Dec. 14, 1998, signed by Gov. Lawton Chiles and everything. And now they're doing this to me? I served every day of my sentence plus some for bad behavior,'' she said.
`DON'T LIKE IT'
Norman Carter, 45, of Fort Lauderdale, also on the list, keeps his May 20, 2003, clemency papers folded in his Bible.
''I don't appreciate it, I don't like it and I wish I knew what I could do about it,'' said Carter, a Democrat, convicted of dealing in stolen property in 1988.
''I know how critical these elections have been lately,'' he said.
Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.
''It's just not right,'' said state Rep. Chris Smith, who represents and lives in a Fort Lauderdale neighborhood hit hardest by the list, the city's historic black neighborhood.
''Those who have been disenfranchised before seem to be continually disenfranchised by our archaic laws,'' Smith said.
WERE NEVER TOLD
Several of the three dozen voters on the state list interviewed by The Herald were not aware that their rights had been restored through the clemency process.
''I'm upset because I had clemency all these years and nobody told me,'' said Roger Maddox, 51, a Miami Democrat who received clemency in 1977 for a 1973 theft conviction.
''Now I'm on a purge list . . . man,'' he said.Maddox said he intends to visit the Miami-Dade elections office to get his name removed from the list. ``Give me the number, man. This is crazy.''
Craft said it is possible that some names are incorrectly included in the database because the match was less then perfect when elections officials made their comparisons.
To identify registered voters with felony convictions, the Division of Elections compared names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and other identifying information.
Elections officials said there are 311 voters who may have clemency who were left on the list.
''But in each case the database is flagged so the supervisors of elections know there was a match of some kind,'' Craft said. ``The supervisors know automatically that those 311 potentially have clemency.''
SOME NAMES FLAGGED
County elections supervisors interviewed acknowledged that some of the names are flagged. But they wonder why it is that already overburdened elections employees should investigate facts the state has not been able to definitively answer itself.
Kay Clem, elections supervisor in Indian River County, said her staff ``is dealing with terms they've never heard of before. We need a lot more training.''
Clem said her office is hiring a private company to investigate the 365 names that appear on its list.
''This is putting us in a very precarious situation,'' Clem said.
INVESTIGATE VOTERS
All county elections supervisors are required to investigate each voter on the list, verify whether or not he or she is eligible to vote, then notify by mail suspected felons who have not had their civil rights restored.
The certified letter is supposed to name a time and place voters can appear to explain why they should remain on the rolls.
If supervisors suspect the letters were not received, they're supposed to publish at least one notice in the local newspaper.
If there's no response within 30 days, supervisors must remove the person from the rolls.
No one interviewed by The Herald -- including 53-year-old Walter Gibbons of Miami Gardens, a Vietnam veteran convicted of drug possession in 1973 -- had yet received a letter.''I don't think it's fair that they're trying to stop me from voting, because everybody that commits a crime does not stay a criminal,'' said Gibbons, an ordained minister granted clemency in 1978. ``I had my error in life, but that was a long time ago, over 30 years now, and I'm a different person.'
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