2 hired to check felon purge list

Broward's voter rolls include more than 6,500 state-identified felons whose voting eligibility must be checked.

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD

Broward County has so many potential felons on its voter rolls that Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes has hired two new employees to tackle the 6,500-person list issued last month by the state.

One full-time employee and a part-timer will be devoted to making sure no one is improperly purged from the county's voter rolls. With more potential felons on its list than any Florida county, Broward has set up deliberate procedures, Snipes said.

''We want to err on the side of the voter,'' Snipes said. 'We don't want to go through the list and say `strike, strike, strike.' ''

But the careful vetting could take months, and will likely push the county close to the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Last month, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood released a list of 47,000 registered voters statewide identified as possible felons who had not had their voting rights restored, and asked local supervisors to begin purging them from their rolls.

Florida is one of only a few states in which convicted felons who have completed their sentence do not automatically get back their right to vote. Instead, they must apply for restoration, a cumbersome process that in many cases requires approval by the governor and other elected officials.

Election supervisors in each of Florida's 67 counties establish their own procedures for purging people from the list, which has a controversial history. Before the 2000 presidential election, some counties used a state list that included out-of-state conviction information to purge some people. Several lawsuits resulted.

Many people now question the accuracy of the new state list.

''I don't think it's a fair process,'' said state Rep. Chris Smith, a Fort Lauderdale Democrat who has pushed to make it easier for ex-cons to restore their voting rights. ``The more eyes looking at this list, the more chances you get to catch mistakes.''

Earlier this month, county election officials left a statewide seminar without a clear consensus on their approach to purging.

The stakes are high: Every move to purge or restore voters from the rolls is scrutinized in Florida, where President Bush won by only 537 votes in 2000.

Although all Florida counties must tackle the felon issue, Broward County's voter rolls are especially troublesome. The rolls saw little maintenance under former Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant before she was suspended in November by the governor.

Miami-Dade, with about 3,600 potential felons on the state list, has half as many felons as Broward and more accurate rolls in general, because clerks have been continually updating them.

The Miami-Dade office hasn't hired anyone new, but they're also taking a very measured, careful approach, said elections spokesman Seth Kaplan.

''We're not going to put anyone in felon status until we're sure they should be in felon status,'' Kaplan said.

The first step in Miami-Dade and Broward will be to check the state list against the database from the state Office of Executive Clemency to determine whether people have had their rights restored.

Bush announced last week that the state Office of Executive Clemency has slashed a one-time backlog of 62,000 people who were seeking to restore their voting rights to just 8,000.