TALLAHASSEE - Florida election officials conceded an enormous mistake Saturday and abandoned the controversial list the state was using to remove convicted felons from the state's voter rolls.
The reason for the about face, after defending the list in a letter to local elections officials as late as 5 p.m. Friday: a flaw in the method fails to include most felons who classify themselves as Hispanic.
Secretary of State Glenda Hood announced at 1 p.m. Saturday that an ''unintentional and unforeseen discrepancy'' in the potential felon database ''related to Hispanic classification'' has forced the agency to eliminate the list from further consideration this election year.
Of the nearly 48,000 people on the list created by the Division of Elections, using information from the Florida Departments of Law Enforcement and Corrections, only 61 were classified as Hispanics.
The net effect of the decision is that the state will no longer rely on the list to remove felons from the voter rolls, thereby allowing individual supervisors of elections to come up with their own system of removing ineligible voters from the election rolls in their counties.
''We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred,'' Hood said in the statement. ``. . .We will be reviewing the issue to determine how it could have occurred and why it was not recognized until now.''
The method of determining how convicted felons would be identified was laid out in a 2002 settlement agreement between the state and several civil rights groups. The method uses race as one of several factors to determine whether a felon has registered to vote. The others are first name, last name and date of birth. If one of those fails to match up, the name is not added to the list for potential purging.
But the database of felons supplied by FDLE does not list Hispanic as an ethnic group ''believe it or not,'' said Nicole DeLara, spokeswoman for the secretary of state. ``We have not been able to determine why this wasn't caught. The potential felon database is now retroactively void.''
This is the second major about face in less than a week by the Republican administration as persistent scrutiny by the media and civil rights groups forced Gov. Jeb Bush and elections officials to back off previous positions about their handling of the list of former felons.
On Wednesday, the Division of Elections acknowledged that the list of potentially ineligible voters included 1,600 former felons whose voting rights had been restored.
Civil rights advocates, who have demanded the state withdrawal the list, on Saturday praised the decision.
''It's unfortunate it took this long to come to the realization that the list was just fraught with errors and it wasn't meant to be,'' said Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute. ``But it's a good thing that they realized he error of their ways and are doing the right thing for once.''
The accuracy of the statewide list has been called into question on a number of fronts.
The New York-based Brennan Center for Justice last month questioned whether the state mistakenly included on the list thousands of people whose voting rights had been legally restored by the Florida Clemency Board.
State officials challenged the center's findings, but admitted the Office of Executive Clemency did not give the Division of Election clemency records for former felons whose rights were restored prior to 1977.
''We just found one problem after another with the list,'' Jessie Allen, associate counsel at the Brennan Center, said Saturday. ``It's wonderful the Secretary of State decided to step up and do the right thing.''
Last week, The Miami Herald reported that more than 2,100 Florida voters, many of them black Democrats, were on the list even though their civil rights had been formally restored by the state.
Of those, more than 1,600 got their voting rights back after they had registered to vote, prompting state officials to demand they re-register before November's election or risk removal from the rolls.
The Florida Justice Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida threatened to sue, and the state scrapped that policy late last week.
Berg and ACLU legal affairs director Randall Marshall also urged the state to kill the entire list.
''It makes perfect sense,'' Marshall said Saturday. ``It's the absolute right thing to do.''
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