Defend voters' rights

The state insults everyone by hiring pricey lawyers to oppose your right to open records

Better open your wallet.

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood is hitting taxpayers with a bill of at least $125,000 for lawyers to keep citizens from checking the lists of people to be purged from voter rolls.

In other words, she's making you pay lawyers to fight against your own right to see records that your own money paid for.

Hood could have settled a case seeking public access to the lists, or as state Rep. Chris Smith, D-Fort Lauerdale, pointed out she could have used state lawyers.

Instead, she hired a team headed by Miami attorney Joe Klock, who argued former Secretary of State Katharine Harris' case in the contentious 2000 Florida presidential election.

You're paying him $425 an hour to beat back a case filed by CNN and other news organizations that include FLORIDA TODAY, asking the court to dump the law passed in 2001 by the Republican-controlled Legislature to keep the public in the dark.

Leon Circuit Judge Nikki Clark will decide the matter later this month, and for the sake of public faith in fair elections particularly in Florida where they have been brought into serious question we hope she supports open government.

FLORIDA TODAY joined the case because while Florida says felons can't vote unless their rights have been restored, lists of possible felons to be purged from the rolls are loaded with errors.

The case wants the court to let the public get the lists and check them, to be sure no one is illegally disqualified.

Why is it important? Because as many as 50,000 people were wrongly refused the right to vote in the 2000 election that George W. Bush won by just 537 votes.

This year's purge lists name nearly 48,000 people so far and early checks already show problems. Only an objective examination can cut the chance of more errors, and just as important, assure Floridians the state is doing its job correctly.

Under Florida's long legal tradition of government in the Sunshine, it's indefensible that information so essential to assuring the most basic right of a democracy the right to vote should be hidden from the public.

It's even worse that the law allows certain groups privileges above those of ordinary citizens. Politicians and political parties get unlimited access to these lists, to read, copy and disseminate.

But in a transparent effort to pretend to follow open-government laws, ordinary people can look at records, but only one at a time, and can't even scribble down a name on a scratch pad.

What's Hood's defense? Keeping the list hidden "protects privacy," she says.

Ridiculous.

The lists are practically gift-wrapped for the convenience of politicians, and if Hood is talking about felons' privacy, their cases already are public record.

Instead of fighting to assure every possible legal vote, Hood is standing in the way. And she's doing it even though State Attorney General Charlie Crist doubts the law is worth defending.

Here's the bottom line, and it doesn't require a pricey lawyer:

In a democracy, the people have a right to open government. Get it, Secretary Hood?