State knew about flaws in felon list

So says company that helped develop it

SARASOTA - State election officials knew since at least 1998 that a recently scrapped felons list designed to clear convicted felons from voter rolls would have a glitch and exclude Hispanics, according to a company that helped create the list.

Private company DBT helped build the felons list for the 2000 election. DBT, which was later bought by ChoicePoint, discussed the difficulties involving Hispanic felons with experts in the Secretary of State's Office in late 1997 or early 1998, ChoicePoint spokesman Chuck Jones said this week.

ChoicePoint and state officials analyzed the data together and realized that using race would create an inaccurate list because of the problems with Hispanics or Latinos, he said.

"We determined jointly that it was not reliable," Jones told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for a story in Tuesday's editions.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood scrapped the list July 10 after it was reported that it contained few people identified as Hispanic. That was because when voters register in Florida, they can identify themselves as Hispanic - but the FDLE database has no Hispanic category, excluding people from the list if that race is listed. The FDLE list was compared with the voter rolls to determine who should be barred from voting.

Hood spokeswoman Nicole de Lara, reached Tuesday by The Associated Press, said she could not confirm or deny Jones' remarks. But elections officials and Gov. Jeb Bush have insisted that the error was an oversight and not intentional.

"The secretary of state had absolutely no knowledge before recalling the list," de Lara said.

De Lara pointed out that Hood was not in office when the list was designed and that she has called for an audit of what led to the Hispanic flaw.

Although Hood took office after the list was designed, many of her employees worked on the current list and the one used in 2000, the newspaper reported.

Jones cited Janet Modrow as one of the state employees who would have known about the race problem. Modrow, who also played a central role in developing the latest felons list, told the newspaper that she couldn't comment, saying she first needed permission from Hood's office before she could answer questions.

Department of State records show that the issue of race came up again in an October 2001 meeting. Technical advisers concluded that Hispanic could not be used as a separate race category in creating the match, meeting minutes show.

Paul Craft, voting-systems chief with the Division of Elections, said he recalled discussing concerns over relying on race to match felons and voters. But Craft said he forgot to mention those concerns to Clay Roberts, the elections chief in 2002.

In May 2002, just days before the voter database was unveiled, Roberts ordered a rewrite of the matching procedures.

He insisted that a registered voter's race match exactly with someone in the FDLE database. Because the FDLE classifies Hispanics as white, Roberts' decision meant voters who registered as Hispanics would be excluded from the felons list.

Roberts, who now works in the state Attorney General's Office, said Monday that he did not remember being at a meeting where the issue was addressed but that he "vaguely" remembers concerns about how race was kept in voter-registration records.

Florida is one of a handful of states that do not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons once they have completed their sentences.

In another development, a federal appeals court in Atlanta on Tuesday set aside a previous order by a three-judge panel granting a trial challenging the constitutionality of the state law. The full court has agreed to the state's request to reconsider the case, an option rarely granted.

Attorney Anita Earls, co-counsel for ex-felons suing the state, said she didn't think the two-paragraph order announcing the court's plans indicates favoritism toward the state. She said the court will specify the issues it wants to examine later when it sets a schedule for both sides to file court papers.