Civil Rights Board Wants Inquiry on Florida Voter-Purge List
By FORD FESSENDEN

Published: July 16, 2004

 

WASHINGTON, July 15 - Members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called on the Justice Department on Thursday to investigate possible voting-rights violations in Florida's troubled effort to purge felons from its voter registration lists.

At a hearing on the state's effort to use a list of 48,000 suspected felons to trim voter rolls, the civil rights commission's chairman, Mary Frances Berry, also urged the newly created federal Election Assistance Commission, which is distributing millions of dollars to the states for voting improvements, to consider withholding Florida's share.

The civil rights commission, which has no power to take action itself, has been deeply critical of Florida since the 2000 election. The hearing on Thursday, part of a series the commission is holding to dramatize voting problems before the 2004 election, focused on the Florida purge. Dr. Berry said she would ask the Justice Department to investigate the possibility that the purge violated the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against minorities.

On Saturday, the Florida secretary of state, Glenda Hood, suspended the state's felon effort, citing a methodological flaw that virtually guaranteed that voters who registered as Hispanics would not be purged, while thousands of blacks might be.

Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hood, said the secretary of state would audit the process of developing the felon matching list to answer questions about why the flaw was not caught earlier. Ms. Nash also said that the state's effort did not violate the Voting Rights Act, but that the state would cooperate in any Justice Department investigation.

Ms. Hood declined an invitation to appear at Thursday's hearing, but sent a letter saying that county election supervisors would remove felons from the rolls without using the state list. Florida is one of seven states that ban felons from voting, unless they successfully petition to have their rights restored.

Dr. Berry said she was concerned that Ms. Hood's new plan would be even worse than the original problem, possibly violating Bush v. Gore, the landmark case that stopped recounts in the 2000 presidential election because there was no uniform standard among Florida's counties for counting votes.

Representatives of civil rights organizations who testified said they were already planning lawsuits to stop county efforts to purge voters.

"Florida is absolutely committed to blocking voters," said Barbara Arnwine, director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "All of the civil rights organizations are in intense discussions, and we think there are three or four lawsuits that should be filed here."

Gracia Hillman, the vice chairwoman of the Election Assistance Commission, told the civil rights commission yesterday that her agency did not have the authority to deny Florida its share of federal money appropriated under the Help America Vote Act. Florida has already received $47 million this year, and is eligible for an additional $85 million.

The commission also sharply questioned a representative from Accenture, the private company that Florida retained to help set up the felon-matching operation. Dr. Berry wanted to know who had failed to find the flaw that resulted in Hispanic felons being left off the purge list.

Meg McLaughlin, an Accenture partner, said she did not know, but that it was not her company's responsibility.

Under the state's methodology, if a name and birth date were matched in the felon and voter databases, but the races did not match, the person was not put on the purge list. Ms. McLaughlin said her company did not know that the state's felon database did not have a designation for Hispanic, a fact that resulted in only a handful of the state's approximately 650,000 registered Hispanic voters making the purge list, compared with more than 20,000 blacks.

Hispanics tend to register as Republicans in Florida, while blacks are overwhelmingly Democrats.

"We were not provided with that information," Ms. McLaughlin said, adding, "I would think we should have been."

She declined to say whose responsibility it was to give the company the information.