Civil rights groups still concerned about purged voters

RACHEL LA CORTE

Associated Press

MIAMI - Civil rights organizations say the state's scrapping of a controversial list of possible felons was a victory for voters, but counties must still ensure that information they receive from other sources is accurate before purging their voter rolls.

State officials abandoned the list of nearly 48,000 names on Saturday after problems emerged in the weeks since copies of the list were released.

Now that the list is defunct, local election offices will continue their routine practice of reviewing court information each month to remove felons.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said that former felons who had their rights restored will need to check with their local supervisor of elections to make sure they weren't inadvertently removed from the rolls.

"You cannot assume anything at this point, there's been so much confusion," he said. "I'm still nervous about what's going to happen."

In the past week, the Florida Division of Elections has changed course on two major issues concerning ex-felons. Last Wednesday, the state did an about-face and said it would allow to vote almost 2,500 former felons whose restored rights had been threatened with revocation.

Officials had originally said that state law required that those former felons be d from the rolls because they had registered before they received clemency.

Then on Saturday, Secretary of State Glenda Hood discarded the list of possible felons created by the Florida department of Law Enforcement after learning it 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 decision to abandon the list doesn't change the task of the state's 67 supervisors of elections, who are required by law to purge ineligible voters from their rolls. 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.

"It's still against the law to vote in the state of Florida if you are a convicted felon who has not received clemency," Hood spokeswoman Nicole de Lara said.

The state's purge of felons has been controversial since the 2000 presidential election, when Republican George W. Bush carried Florida's decisive 25 electoral votes by 537 votes of more than six million cast. A private company hired to identify ineligible voters 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 sent to the state's supervisors in May. Hood didn't want to distribute copies, but CNN and several other media organizations sued. A judge ordered copies released and problems with the list were quickly detected.

"Just imagine what would have happened if the felon purge list had not been made public," Simon said. "Those inaccuracies would have been in the system on Election Day and thousands would have gone to cast their vote and would have been blocked from doing so."

Most election offices 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.

On Election Day, those who feel they have been inadvertently removed from the voter rolls will be allowed to use a provisional ballot that will be examined later to determine eligibility.

Clay County Supervisor of Elections Barbara Kirkman said she has only purged two people from her voter rolls so far based on court information, and her office talked to both of them to ensure they were ineligible.

She said the state's supervisors of elections don't want to disenfranchise any voter.

"We do not get names and just automatically start purging people," she said. "We want to have a good election. There was a lot of bad publicity in 2000. We want to show people we have tried to clean up things and do things better."