Bush appoints a mediator in voter-roll dispute

By John Kennedy
Tallahassee Bureau
Posted July 21 2004

 
TALLAHASSEE · Gov. Jeb Bush appointed a mediator Tuesday to resolve disputes between Florida elections officials and civil-justice lawyers over maintaining voter rolls.

David Strawn, a former Central Florida circuit judge and law professor, is to begin working with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and Secretary of State Glenda Hood's office.

"This mediation offers an opportunity for all concerned in Florida's election procedures to bring forward their issues about voter registration or voter removal under the state elections code or federal law," Bush said in a letter, adding that, "an orderly resolution of these issues would better serve the people of Florida than ad hoc complaints."

The letter was sent to four organizations that have raised concerns about state election procedures, including the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Strawn, 68, has taught at the University of Florida law school and has been a legal mediator for 20 years.

His appointment follows Hood's decision earlier this month to scrap a statewide database of nearly 48,000 "potential felons" whose names were sent to Florida's 67 county election supervisors for review and possible removal from voter rolls.

While abandoning the statewide database, Hood has asked county elections supervisors to verify voter eligibility by reviewing local court records. Guidance for that task is expected to be central to the mediation between the state and Brennan Center, which earlier sent Hood's office a letter detailing alleged violations of state and federal voting rights laws stemming from the list.

The database was discarded after news media revealed the list contained only 61 Hispanic surnames, apparently because of a data glitch. Newspapers also showed that more than 2,000 names of felons were listed even though their voting rights had been restored.

The database included more than 22,000 blacks, making it much more likely that black Floridians could be ped from voter rolls. In Florida, Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Republican.

Hood's distribution of the list infuriated Democrats and black voters' organizations who recall bitterly the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida, when thousands of voters, many of them black, were turned away from polling places because of errors involving a similar felon list.

In another voter-related development, the private company DBT, which helped build the felons list used in 2000, reported difficulties involving Hispanic felons to experts in former Secretary of State Sandra Mortham's office in late 1997 or early 1998, a spokesman told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Chuck Jones, a spokesman for ChoicePoint, which has acquired DBT, said the company and state officials analyzed the data and realized using race would create an inaccurate list because Hispanics would not be included.