Replacing Hood vital first step in voter-list fiasco

``Unintentional and unforeseen.''

Those were the words Glenda Hood Jeb Bush's handpicked secretary of state used to describe the massive mistakes her office made in developing a list of more than 47,000 convicted felons who were in jeopardy of having their voting rights stripped away from them in the upcoming election.

Turned out more than 2,100 people, including a disproportionate number of blacks, were wrongly on the list. Even more amazing, the list contained only 61 Hispanics because the databases used to compile the list didn't mesh. Some databases identify Hispanics by race while others list them by their ethnicity.

The result is that Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican, were being left on the voting rolls, while black Democrats were being removed.

''I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it was unintentional and unforeseen,'' spokeswoman Nicole de Lara told me three weeks ago, reiterating her boss' position.

At the time I questioned how Hood or de Lara could be so certain no one in their office knew the databases had trouble identifying Hispanics. De Lara was indignant that I would suggest anyone in the secretary of state's office would have known about the problem.

Oops. Turns out that was a big mistake, too.

On Tuesday, the company that first started assembling the felon purge list in the late '90s said state election officials knew Hispanics were unlikely to show up on any list that used race as a criteria. Chuck Jones, a spokesman for ChoicePoint, formerly known as DBT, told me the secretary of state's office was told about the problem in 1998.

''DBT and the secretary of state's office determined that using race as an identifier category was not reliable,'' Jones said. ``Our personnel, as well as the secretary of state's office, found that the various lists largely did not even include information about race.

``Further, lists that did include race often listed Hispanics or Latinos as either white or other. So the information either didn't exist or the information wasn't entirely accurate.''

Hood was not secretary of state in 1998, but some of those DBT warned at the time, are still with elections and were involved in creating the most recent list, including Janet Modrow, who helped oversee the felon list. ''[Modrow] was one of the individuals in the secretary of state's office who worked with DBT on developing the criteria to develop a list,'' Jones said.

The discovery that state officials knew that Hispanics wouldn't show up on the purge list was first reported Tuesday in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The paper also cited minutes from meetings within the secretary of state's office in October 2001, where the department's technical advisors determined that Hispanics could not be used as a separate race category in creating a purge list.

Hood, whose reputation is beyond repair, once again attempted damage control on Wednesday. ''That was a long time ago,'' Hood told The Herald, referring to the warnings by DBT. ''First of all, we don't know who was aware or if anybody was aware.'' Hood has called for an audit to investigate how her department developed the list.

An audit, however, is too little, too late. Congressman Robert Wexler, a Palm Beach Democrat, says Hood must go.

''This is only the most recent round of revelations which can only lead an objective person to conclude that Secretary Hood is running a corrupt agency,'' he told me Wednesday. ``This is an agency that is either so inept or so incredibly devoid of integrity that they are seeking to eliminate people's right to vote and they are minimizing the opportunity for a fair election in Florida.''

Firing Hood and replacing her with a nonpartisan individual or group to oversee the state's election would be only the first step to restoring voter confidence. After that, we need a grand jury to start issuing subpoenas to find out exactly what people knew, and when they knew it. Only then will we get to the truth.