Florida voters begin to contest removal from election rolls

RACHEL LA CORTE

Associated Press

MIAMI - Daren Jones lost his right to vote with a guilty plea to a federal drug charge six years ago. After he was turned away from his precinct in the 2000 presidential election, he asked the state to restore his civil rights.

Gov. Jeb Bush and the state clemency board approved the request last year and the 30-year-old Democrat voted for John Kerry in Florida's March presidential preference primary.

But last month, the Miami-Dade County elections supervisor sent Jones a letter informing him that his voting rights had been revoked because of his "recent felony conviction." The letter said he could apply with the state to have his rights restored.

Instead of calling the elections supervisor, Jones took his voter registration card, clemency paperwork and the supervisor's letter to local radio and TV stations. His name was quickly restored to the rolls.

"I would not let anything like this keep me from voting," he said. "I worked too hard to get my rights back."

Jones' case and similar ones have raised concerns among civil rights groups about how easily a voter who's run afoul of the law can be disenfranchised based on old or inaccurate information. Florida is one of only a handful of states that does not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons once they've completed their sentence.

With the Aug. 31 primary approaching, elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties are beginning to purge their voter rolls of up to 47,763 potential felons identified by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Some supervisors have expressed concern over the accuracy of the list and have said they would verify each name before removing someone from the voting rolls.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said civil rights groups are prepared to go to court if they believe voters are disenfranchised.

"We are toying with the most fundamental right an American citizen has, the right to vote," Simons said. "How many other people may have their fundamental right to vote removed so cavalierly as a result of bureaucratic incompetence?"

State officials say no registered voter will be turned away on Election Day. Anyone who shows up at the polls and are told they were removed from the rolls will receive a provisional ballot, which will be later examined to determine the voter's eligibility.

"The supervisors are going to err on the side of the voter," said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's chief elections officer.

The purge of felons from voter rolls has been a thorny issue since the 2000 presidential election. A private company hired to identify ineligible voters before the election produced a list with scores of errors and elections supervisors used it to remove voters without verifying its accuracy. A federal lawsuit led to an agreement to restore rights to thousands of voters.

The FDLE distributed its list of potential felons in May, but Jones was not among the 3,600 names listed in Miami-Dade. Instead, the elections supervisor got his name from the local circuit court.

Miami-Dade elections supervisor Constance Kaplan said the court sends monthly notices of felony convictions to her office. Under Florida law, supervisors can remove those people from their rolls "after verification of information received from other sources."

Kaplan, who has said she won't purge names on the state's list from voter rolls without checking to make sure that person should be removed, said her office did not call the Office of Clemency in Jones' case because they've never received inaccurate information from the court before. She said she's changed that policy: "None of these letters, regardless of the source, will go out unless we've clarified whether these people have received clemency."

Jones said he's turned his life around since his 1998 arrest following a drug deal that resulted in him being robbed and the shooting death of his best friend. Married and the father of two young children, Jones works as a traveling salesman by day and a youth counselor for at-risk teens in the evening. He looks forward to voting in his first presidential election since his arrest.

"I feel I'm one of the lucky ones because I was able to catch this months from the election," he said. "What about the people who find this out two days before the election?"

In other parts of the state, voters are starting to receive letters informing them that they are at risk of being removed from the polls.

In Brevard County, 1,029 people were listed as potential felons on the list.

Joseph Williams was one of the first to get a letter. Problem is, he's never been convicted of anything.

"I was upset," said the 47-year-old furniture store technician from Palm Bay. "I called them and told them they had the wrong person."

Records obtained by The Associated Press show that after Williams contested the letter, further research was done by state officials. FDLE officials then checked a box that noted "Records indicate subject IS NOT a convicted felon in Florida."

Brevard elections supervisor Fred Galey said 51 voters have responded. Some confirmed they hadn't yet applied for clemency, and others provided proof that they had.

"It's their personal responsibility to ensure their information is correct," Galey said. "We're only trying to help them get their records right (with) the state."

But Kevin Aplin, of the ACLU in Brevard, said the election supervisor's actions shows he "isn't using due diligence in doing an exhaustive check" before mailing the letters.

Larger counties, such as Broward and Palm Beach - the epicenter of voting problems during the 2000 election - have said they are in no rush to send those letters out. Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes has hired two extra workers to verify the accuracy of the list of 6,500 potential felons on the county's voter rolls. To the north in Indian River County, elections supervisor Kay Clem has given her list to an independent contractor who specializes in background checks to check the accuracy of the list.

By law, supervisors must verify that the people on the list provided to them by FDLE are indeed felons, that they are the same people on voting lists and that their voting rights have not been restored.

The counties then send a certified letter to the people and put a notice in the paper, after which the voter needs to respond within 30 days or else be automatically removed from the rolls.

The list of names was distributed last month when a Tallahassee judge ruled in favor of CNN and several other news organizations that sued the state Division of Elections seeking copies of the list.

State officials have said there are names on the list who are not felons, and elections workers have had flagged more than 300 people listed who might have received clemency. Others on the list had registered to vote before they received clemency, election officials said. Those people need to register to vote again.