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.

BY DEBBIE CENZIPER AND ERIKA BOLSTAD

ELECTIONS

The Florida Division of Elections did an about-face Wednesday, acknowledging that 1,600 former felons whose voting rights had been restored should be removed from its list of potentially ineligible voters.

The Herald reported last week that the 1,600 were among more than 2,100 felons who remained on the state's list even though they had regained the right to vote.

State officials initially insisted they were simply following Florida law by including the 1,647, each of whom had registered to vote before their civil rights had been restored. County elections supervisors were directed to contact each voter and have them reregister before the November election or face removal from the voting rolls.

Yet the Department of State whose secretary, Glenda Hood, reports to Gov. Jeb Bush backtracked on the issue.

Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts officially reversed the plan on Wednesday, saying in a letter to local elections supervisors, ``It is the intent of the Division to ensure that all eligible voters are allowed to vote.''

CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS

The decision drew praise from civil rights groups, who argued that qualified voters could have been kicked off the rolls because of administrative errors and bureaucratic bungling.

Advocates with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Justice Institute, who threatened to sue unless the state switched course, also said that forcing voters to reregister served no legitimate purpose and potentially violated the law.

''I think it was a needless impediment to the right to vote in Florida,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida.

Several voters interviewed by The Herald said they have been voting for years and did not know they had to reregister or risk the loss of their voting rights.

''It's nice they realized it's America, and you've got the right to vote,'' said 73-year-old Selvin Cobb of Lauderhill, who registered to vote in 1978 five months after he was sentenced to probation for firing a gun indoors.

State records show he won back his voting rights five years later, and the Democrat has voted repeatedly over the years, most recently in the March primary election. Yet until the state's reversal, he and others like him faced the prospect of being barred from the polls.

County elections supervisors, with just months to go before the presidential election, had balked at the state's mandate requiring those voters to reregister. Many considered it a paper-pushing technicality at a time when local election officials must investigate thousands of names, determine who is eligible to vote, and then notify by mail any suspected felons who have not had their civil rights restored.

''That's good news for the voters, and certainly it makes a lot of our tasks easier to follow,'' said Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan. ``We haven't even started the process because we haven't really had time to verify everything that's going on. We want to make sure people aren't disenfranchised.''

Simon cautioned that the state list of 47,000 possible felons registered to vote must still be scrutinized for mistaken identities and other irregularities before elections supervisors begin removing people from the rolls.

Another 500 voters who have won clemency remain on the list, for instance.

Florida has weathered criticism nationwide for its efforts to purge voting rolls of felons. In 2000, a list of potentially ineligible voters distributed to supervisors was tainted with errors, and many supervisors ignored the list.

`FIRST STEP'

State Rep. Chris Smith, a Democrat who represents the neighborhood hardest hit by the new list, saw the state's move on Wednesday as a ''first step.'' In the African-American core of central Fort Lauderdale, The Herald found the highest concentration of voters who had their rights restored but remained on the state's list.

Smith, the incoming state House minority leader, has repeatedly filed bills to automatically restore the voting rights of former felons who have paid for their crimes.

''The next step is doing away with the list,'' Smith said. ``If we have the same problems we've had in the past, in the 2000 election, it will draw attention to the fact that this list is more trouble than it's worth.''