More Fla. democracy: Hispanic felons get to vote, and Jeb stays mum

 Two reporters here at the Herald-Tribune just found a grossly unfair glitch in this year's Florida voter purge list.

It is a problem that no amount of caution or commitment to fairness by local election supervisors can fix. And the flaw is bizarre.

The list is designed to help each county's election supervisor remove felons from voter rolls. Close to half the people on the purge list are black, but that isn't a mistake. Whatever the causes or political implications, black people make up close to half of Florida's prison population. And we would expect the racial and ethnic balance of the purge list to be fairly close to that of the prison population.

Yet with Hispanics, it is a different story. A way, way, way different story.

About 11 percent of Florida's prison population is Hispanic. So, what percentage of the voter purge list is Hispanic?

Rounded off to the nearest percentage point, it is: zero.

No kidding. Of 47,763 people on the list, only a smattering are Hispanic. They add up to about a tenth of a percent.

That adamantly shouts that, at best, a huge mistake was made. Hispanics aren't just under-represented, or even amazingly under-represented. Statistically, they are gone.

I can't blame anyone who thinks this was engineered purposely. Florida's Hispanic voters traditionally tend to vote Republican in presidential elections, almost as reliably as black voters tend to support Democrats. A purge list with the expected percentage of black felons that omits almost all Hispanic felons is highly suspect.

If blacks were absent from that list and Hispanics fully represented, you know what Republicans would say.

Still, it could be a mistake. In a front page story on Wednesday, Herald-Tribune reporters Chris Davis and Matthew Doig reported it might be a result of trouble matching databases. Hispanics have a higher than usual rate of inconsistency in listing their race, and in how they list last names. That could make it hard for the state to match Hispanics in voter rolls to Department of Corrections records.

I'm wary of that theory. Such inconsistency could account for some mistakes, certainly. But an error rate approaching 100 percent?

Whatever the cause, something about the procedure all but guarantees Hispanic felons won't be purged. And even if this result is accidental, how is it that no one noticed it?

No one mentioned it, anyway. State officials touted this this year's purge list as new and improved. But the state refused to release the list to newspapers and other groups that wanted to study it to see if it was really better than the wildly inaccurate list that became infamous for wrongly purging legitimate voters in 2000.

It took a lawsuit to force the Division of Elections to turn over the 2004 purge list. Hours after getting a copy this week, reporters Doig and Davis saw what should have been obvious to those who put it together: Hispanics were overwhelmingly absent.

It was as if there had been a Rapture just for Hispanic felons.

Gov. Jeb has made many a statement about his commitment to ending Florida's election nightmares. But when asked on Tuesday about this mysteriously unfair glitch, his spokeswoman was adamant: No comment from that office.

It seems Jeb doesn't want to hear or talk about anything amiss in election land. That only fuels the unavoidable suspicion that bizarre election problems, accidental or not, still aren't considered a problem here if they help the governor's brother.