Elections supervisors relieved to disregard felon voter list

CORALIE CARLSON

Associated Press

 

MIAMI - State officials were smart to abandon a disputed list designed to take felons off the voter rolls - a move that would likely please election supervisors, the president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections said Sunday.

Bill Cowles said Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood made the "smartest decision" to the list after problems emerged in the weeks since the list was made public. Hundreds of people named on the list had received clemency or not committed crimes and a flaw kept many Hispanic felons out of the database.

"I think that most supervisors are going to be pleased," said Cowles, who is also the Orange County elections supervisor. "Again, we were the ones that said we were going to move very cautiously."

Many supervisors at their summer conference said they were worried about the accuracy of the list they received in May and would not begin purging names from the voter rolls without additional guidance from the state.

Hood scrapped the list Saturday after learning the potential felon list created by the Florida department of Law Enforcement contained few people identified as Hispanic. The flaw occurred because two databases that were merged to form the disputed list were incompatible, officials said.

The glitch in a state President Bush won by just 537 votes could have been significant - because of the state's sizable Cuban population, Florida Hispanics have tended to vote Republican more than Hispanics nationally. The list had about 28,000 Democrats and 9,500 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.

Most election offices, including Orange County's, were still reviewing the list when it was scrapped and had not begun sending out letters to people who needed to contact election workers about their voting status, Cowles said.

Now that the list is defunct, local election offices will continue their routine practice reviewing court information each month to remove felons, but they will not have to take additional steps to identify and remove felons from the voter rolls, he said.

"We'll just keep doing what we've always done," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Miami-Dade County elections office. His office hadn't begun removing the names from the state list, he said.

Kaplan said getting rid of the list will give elections workers more time to register voters and make sure they know how to use the voting machines.

"We would just rather ... really focus our energy on getting everybody to vote," Kaplan said. "With what were facing this year in Florida, we need to make sure that every vote counts."

In Citrus County, Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill called her office Saturday to send home an employee working on the felon list.

"There's just too much controversy about this," Gill told the St. Petersburg Times. "If the list isn't right, we shouldn't be using it."

Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning said he was relieved he had put off signing a $14,000 contract to hire a company to verify the list for him.

"It was a lose-lose situation," Browning told the Times of the potential felons list. "The reality of it was there seemed to be too many things creeping up that were not thought out, or thought about."

And in Leon County, the supervisor of elections called the list "an unwise policy from Day One."

"We knew there were problems with it from the outset," supervisor Ion Sancho told the Orlando Sentinel. "But now it appears there are so many flaws it's rendered completely useless."

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 that 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 new list was released July 1, with officials saying Bush's administration was simply complying with federal election law. Problems with the list were quickly detected.

A spokeswoman for Hood, Florida's top elections official, did not return phone calls Sunday.