Check 'E' for 'Evasion'

Palm Beach Post Editorial
Sunday, July 11, 2004

When it comes to making sure that every eligible voter in Florida has a chance to vote, the state Division of Elections once again has shirked its duty.

Not only did the agency repeat a mistake of 2000 and produce another faulty list of voters banned because of felony convictions, it refused to let reporters copy the list. The day after a Leon County judge ordered the list released, The Miami Herald found 2,100 ex-felons who should not have been on it.

Not only do the state's actions draw comparisons to the Jim Crow era, but Gov. Bush's elections office is playing bureaucratic games with voter confidence. Nervous voters filed suit last week over touch-screen voting machines. They object to a Division of Elections' rule that bans manual recounts in the 15 counties, including Palm Beach and Martin, with touch-screen voting. The Legislature didn't help when it failed to address laws requiring manual recounts. Voters don't care about legal technicalities. They just want to know that their votes will count, and the state's inaction makes some ask for printers to provide a verifiable record.

Under that kind of pressure, the state would have been wise to get the felons list right. Since legislators refused to throw out a Civil War-era law blocking felons from voting until they go through cumbersome clemency procedures, the law continues to confound state bureaucrats. In 2000, they unleashed an error-laden list drawn up for $4 million by a Republican-connected company. After just 537 votes determined the presidential race in Florida and the nation the list emerged as a focal point for voter rage. Since African-Americans are disproportionately well-represented on the list, and since African-Americans tend to vote Democratic, the state's failure to provide adequate safeguards caused justifiable suspicion.

Cut to this year, when it would have been a simple matter for the Division of Elections to have properly screened the felons list. Instead, it dumped the job on the state's 67 elections supervisors, who could apply varying degrees of scrutiny. Again hanging its credibility on a technicality, the state went to court to keep the public from scrutinizing the list. On July 1, Judge Nikki Clark ordered the list released. On July 2, The Herald published its findings: 2,100 people on the list had received clemency. The state's response to dispute the findings for a week raises even more doubts about its commitment to voters' rights. Obviously, some voters can't help but wonder if the state's felons list is a high-tech, modern-day throwback to the poll taxes and literacy tests that kept most African-Americans from voting until the 1960s.

Four months before Americans go to the polls to elect a president, Gov. Bush and his bureaucrats have done little to earn voters' trust. The best change to emerge after four years of "election reform" is provisional ballots, which let voters whose credentials are questioned cast a vote to be considered later. The governor could have saved the state from embarrassment over its felons list by calling on the Legislature to join the vast majority of states that allow ex-felons to vote. Given the need for Florida to make sure that every vote counts, the state's inaction is inexcusable.