Hood orders review of entire voter database to ensure ineligible people are removed

By John Kennedy
Tallahassee Bureau
Posted July 23 2004

TALLAHASSEE Secretary of State Glenda Hood on Thursday ordered a review of the entire database used to ensure ineligible people are removed from voting rolls, in the face of continuing criticism about a faulty list of potential felons given to elections supervisors.

Hood said she wants to make sure problems don't go beyond that list of 48,000 potential felons who could have been purged from the voter rolls before this year's elections and asked her inspector general to review how the state's voting database was built and what information was available to its designers.

New media reports indicate that similar problems have cropped up before and state officials may have been alerted to them years ago.

We are committed to ensuring successful elections in which every eligible voter can exercise his or her right to vote, Hood said.

The inspector general's entry is expected to help Hood track the scope of problems involving how voter eligibility is determined and how felons are removed from voter rolls, said Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash.

A private company, DBT, which built a similar potential felon list used four years ago, warned state elections officials in 1998 that a glitch existed that could exclude Hispanics.

The latest potential felon database was scrapped after newspaper reporters found it included only 61 Hispanic surnames because of a conflict between voter rolls and Florida Department of Law Enforcement records.

Hood is under rising criticism for going ahead with the list even though some employees in her office apparently knew about problems with the data.

The inspector general's investigation could focus not only on how the latest database was created by the state and private vendor Accenture, but what state officials knew about possible flaws.

"Secretary Hood is trying to find out how this problem was overlooked and why it wasn't recognized until it was too late," Nash said. For Hood, who was appointed secretary of state by Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002, the move also may be an attempt to cool controversy.

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, an early critic of the potential felons list, said Hood might have been victim of poor performance by subordinates.

"She can honestly say she wasn't here when a lot of these decisions were made or wasn't told of potential problems," Sancho said.

"But she's got to stop the hemorrhaging in that department."

Florida Democrats, who have been fanning the election missteps in part to inspire their voting base, said an inspector general's review was a good idea, but not all that was needed.

State Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein of Boca Raton said Hood also should bring in an independent auditing organization to examine touch-screen voting machines used in 15 Florida counties, including Lake and Sumter. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson made a similar call earlier this week.

William McCormick, president of the Fort Lauderdale chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called for an independent citizens review panel to examine the voter list fiasco.

"Citizens deserve the right to be heard. Government is supposed to work for the people," he said. "When it doesn't, the people should be involved in fixing it," McCormick said.

Adora Obi Nweze, state president of the NAACP, was outright leery of Hood's expanded review.

"We've had too many problems to believe any thing she or the state says," Nweze said. "Are they going to guarantee it's going to be accurate this time? I'm not getting excited about anything they say.''

Nweze said she is concerned about the 2004 elections because of a lack of registration by eligible black voters, inaccurate voting lists, questionable voting machine and the debacle with the felons list.

"Concern is putting it mildly,'' she said.

Florida is among 19 battleground states considered too close to call in this year's presidential contest.

Four years ago, President Bush won the White House on the strength of a disputed 537-vote victory in Florida, which saw thousands of ballots ruled ineligible because of voting problems.