Hundreds of Floridians who have voted for years could be stopped because they didn't re-register -- they hadn't been told.

BY DAVID KIDWELL, JASON GROTTO AND ERIKA BOLSTAD

dkidwell@herald.com

More than 1,600 Florida felons whose right to vote was legally restored remain on a state list of potentially ineligible voters because they have yet to re-register to vote, a hurdle that critics say is sure to create confusion as the national election looms.

State officials have directed county election supervisors to make each of the voters -- some of whom have been voting legally for decades -- register again before the November presidential election.

The move is drawing fire from several fronts -- from local election supervisors forced to deal with the bureaucratic morass, from black politicians who believe that the list unfairly targets minorities, and from voting rights activists who say it skirts the spirit of open voting.

''It's a throwback to a very ugly period in American history -- a time when state officials in the deep South threw up irrelevant stumbling blocks to keep black people from voting,'' said Randall Marshall, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

But administrators of the Florida Division of Elections, in the midst of a controversial effort to remove ineligible voters from Florida's rolls, argue that they are following state law.

''Florida law requires that a felon must register to vote after being granted clemency in order for that registration to be valid,'' Secretary of State Glenda Hood said in a news release issued Friday.

Hood's remarks came in response to a Herald report Friday that revealed that at least 2,119 voters on the state's list of potentially ineligible voters had received clemency after their convictions and appear entitled to vote. Black Democrats make up the largest portion of the list, The Herald found.

Hood and her staff spent much of Friday attempting to discredit the story as inaccurate. They did not respond to repeated telephone inquiries and a list of questions e-mailed by the newspaper.

State election officials have come under intense criticism over efforts to purge voter rolls since the 2000 presidential election, when Florida turned the entire presidential race for Republican Gov. Jeb Bush's brother George by the slimmest of historical margins -- 537 votes.

In interviews Thursday, state election administrators offered no explanation of why the 2,119 voters whose rights were restored were included on the list of voters to be removed from the rolls.

But a Herald analysis shows that 1,647 of those 2,119 received their clemency after they registered to vote, some as far back as 1952. Several of the voters interviewed by The Herald said they have been voting for years, and were not aware that they had to go through the paperwork again -- or be barred from voting.

Their names have been flagged in the state's felon voter database with the coding ''CAR'' -- Clemency After Registration. Election supervisors have been told in training seminars that each of them ``must re-register.''

Of the 1,647, nearly a third -- 497 -- legally registered to vote before committing their crimes, then won clemency afterward. Now they face the loss of that right.
The state's list includes people like Denise Baxter of Oakland Park, who was registered to vote in 1980, five years before her felony conviction for welfare fraud.

Baxter, now 44, won clemency and has voted repeatedly for years, most recently in the 2000 presidential election.

Because of her felony conviction, Baxter, who cleans rooms at a Ramada Inn, has never been able to qualify for better-paying work. Even so, she never thought her record would keep her from voting.

''I really do want to vote,'' said Baxter, a Democrat.

U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, said he was outraged at The Herald's findings.
''What they are doing here is illegal, and it goes beyond a simple voting rights issue,'' he said. ``It shows a complete lack of respect for individual rights. They're making people do this, hoping they won't have time. This reminds me of the Jim Crow laws of the 1950s and 1960s in Mississippi. It just sickens me.''

Several county election supervisors interviewed Friday said they have similar concerns, and are leaning toward ignoring state requirements to investigate and remove felons who received clemency after convictions.

''I don't think it's right. It's not fair, and the timing is terrible,'' said Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore. ``If they were going to do this, they should have done it a long time ago or waited until after the election. Frankly, by the time we verify it all and get the letters out, it would probably be too late for the voters to do anything about it.''

Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said she, too, is leaning toward ignoring the requirement.

''If they were registered and got clemency, to me, if you take them off, you just put them back on,'' she said. ``It just seems like a lot of double work, and we don't have time for double work.''

Said Kurt Browning, Pasco County's election chief: ``It's paperwork. It really makes me look like a fool, a typical bureaucrat. All I want to do is the right thing, and then I'm caught in this which-came-first, chicken-or-egg situation. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.''

Civil rights lawyers said a 1960 federal law prohibiting government officials from disqualifying voters over paperwork mistakes or other procedural barriers supersedes the state law invoked by the Division of Elections.

''It doesn't matter whether the mistake is the fault of the government or the voter,'' said Neil Bradley, associate director of the ACLU's voting rights division in Atlanta. ``You can't force people to jump through procedural hoops because of a processing error.''


http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/90711...4117481504miami

Voter clemency upheld :good:
State reverses course with plan
By Paul Flemming and Paige St. John, News-Press Tallahassee Bureau
Published by news-press.com on July 8, 2004


TALLAHASSEE — A day after Secretary of State Glenda Hood said 2,465 felons granted clemency should be thrown off voting rolls and have to register again, the state reversed field and will abandon that policy.

“Upon further review, the Department has determined that a felon granted clemency, regardless of when he or she registered to vote, should be eligible to vote,” Hood said in a statement.

In a Wednesday letter to the attorney for plaintiffs in a 2001 lawsuit, Division of Elections officials said they immediately would change procedures. A letter to county supervisors of elections instructed them to ignore previous instructions and make the new rules retroactive.

“Since it is the intent of the Division to ensure that all eligible voters are allowed to vote, the (clemency after registration) designation has now been removed ...,” said the Wednesday letter from David Spector, an attorney representing the state.
Those affected include 26 voters in Lee County and 19 in Collier County. Though some of them may have committed new crimes, most were tagged in the state’s matching procedures because they registered to vote before clemency was granted. Some were registered even before they committed felonies, but never removed from voting rolls by county election supervisors.

The change came after discussions Wednesday between state lawyers and those from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and the Florida Justice Institute. A 2002 court-approved settlement was designed to restore the voting rights of people who had them wrongly taken away in 1999 and 2000.

On Tuesday, ACLU lawyers sent a three-page letter to Hood, contending that it would violate both state and federal law to remove voters given clemency.
In a response call Wednesday afternoon, Hood’s attorneys told the ACLU the state now agreed, though they did not say why.

ACLU attorney Randall Marshall still has concerns about the remaining purge list.
“This was one aspect of the process,” he said. “We certainly think there are still concerns of accuracy for the remainder of the list. The state should step back and rethink the process.”

Hood’s office also is in mediation this week with the lawyers, who contend the state has violated the settlement.

Florida is one of seven states that does not automatically restore civil rights to felons after they have served their prison sentences.

http://www.news-press.com/news/local_state...gistration.html

State: 1,600 ex-felons eligible to vote

Florida election officials abandoned a controversial plan forcing 1,600 former felons to reregister to vote before November's election -- or risk losing their voting rights.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/91026...76145842miami::

I don't know if they'll get all this nonsense in Florida straightened out in time for people to vote in November, but I DO know that if they don't, and Florida ends up being contentious again like in 2000, we're going to see a revolt the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the Civil War.

And just let the SCOTUS try to intervene again and hand Baby Bush the presidency . . . again. It's not gonna happen. :angry:

Civil rights groups still concerned about purged voters
RACHEL LA CORTE Associated Press

MIAMI - Civil rights organizations say the state's scrapping of a controversial list of possible felons was a victory for voters, but counties must still ensure that information they receive from other sources is accurate before purging their voter rolls.

State officials abandoned the list of nearly 48,000 names on Saturday after problems emerged in the weeks since copies of the list were released. Now that the list is defunct, local election offices will continue their routine practice of reviewing court information each month to remove felons.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said that former felons who had their rights restored will need to check with their local supervisor of elections to make sure they weren't inadvertently removed from the rolls. "You cannot assume anything at this point, there's been so much confusion," he said. "I'm still nervous about what's going to happen."

In the past week, the Florida Division of Elections has changed course on two major issues concerning ex-felons. Last Wednesday, the state did an about-face and said it would allow to vote almost 2,500 former felons whose restored rights had been threatened with revocation.

Officials had originally said that state law required that those former felons be deleted from the rolls because they had registered before they received clemency.

Then on Saturday, Secretary of State Glenda Hood discarded the list of possible felons created by the Florida department of Law Enforcement after learning it contained few people identified as Hispanic. The flaw occurred because two databases that were merged to form the disputed list were incompatible, officials said.

The decision to abandon the list doesn't change the task of the state's 67 supervisors of elections, who are required by law to purge ineligible voters from their rolls. Florida is one of only a handful of states that does not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons once they've completed their sentence. "It's still against the law to vote in the state of Florida if you are a convicted felon who has not received clemency," Hood spokeswoman Nicole de Lara said.

The state's purge of felons has been controversial since the 2000 presidential election, when Republican George W. Bush carried Florida's decisive 25 electoral votes by 537 votes of more than six million cast. A private company hired to identify ineligible voters produced a list with scores of errors, and elections supervisors used it to remove voters without verifying its accuracy.

A federal lawsuit led to an agreement to restore rights to thousands of voters. The new list was sent to the state's supervisors in May. Hood didn't want to distribute copies, but CNN and several other media organizations sued. A judge ordered copies released and problems with the list were quickly detected. "Just imagine what would have happened if the felon purge list had not been made public," Simon said. "Those inaccuracies would have been in the system on Election Day and thousands would have gone to cast their vote and would have been blocked from doing so."

Most election offices were still reviewing the list when it was scrapped and had not begun sending out letters to people who needed to contact election workers about their voting status. On Election Day, those who feel they have been inadvertently removed from the voter rolls will be allowed to use a provisional ballot that will be examined later to determine eligibility.

Clay County Supervisor of Elections Barbara Kirkman said she has only purged two people from her voter rolls so far based on court information, and her office talked to both of them to ensure they were ineligible. She said the state's supervisors of elections don't want to disenfranchise any voter. "We do not get names and just automatically start purging people," she said. "We want to have a good election. There was a lot of bad publicity in 2000. We want to show people we have tried to clean up things and do things better."

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/...666816098miami:

The following petition from Democrats.com aims to stop Florida-style problems from happening in November. Read the petition below and then follow the link to sign it:

Go here to sign the petition: http://democrats.com/elandslide/petition.c...&refer=activist