Second probe ordered of felon list barring vote

S.V. Date
Saturday, July 24, 2004

Just weeks after defending both the quality and secrecy of a list of suspected felons to be purged from Florida voting lists, the state's elections office is now scrambling to explain why the list was so flawed that it had to be scrapped.

Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state, on Thursday announced a second internal investigation into how elections officials could have produced a list that included 22,000 blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, but only 61 Hispanics, who typically lean Republican.

She asked her inspector general's office to review the issue in the broader context of how the entire Central Voter Database which was used to generate the flawed list of potential felons was created in the first place.

In the week previous, Hood, who was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002 after Katherine Harris left the office to run for Congress, had ordered an "audit" of the felons list.

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

Democrats and liberal interest groups were not satisfied by Hood's in-house investigations.

On Thursday, the People for the American Way Foundation sent U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft a letter asking for a federal probe of Hood's office and the creation of the felon list.

"We want a fair and an independent and a nonpartisan investigation," group president Ralph Neas said Friday. "This is either astonishing ineptitude or nefarious conduct.... Some of this does strain credulity."

Eric Holland, a spokesman for Ashcroft's Department of Justice, said Friday he could not comment on Neas' letter.

Neas and many Democrats point out that, under Hood's original position, the problems with the felons list likely never would have been uncovered, and the list would probably have been used for the coming elections.

Hood, citing a 2001 change to the election laws, had refused to release the potential felons list to the press and the public.

The Cable News Network and other media organizations sued for access, and on July 1 a Leon County circuit judge ruled the law banning public access to the list unconstitutional.

The next day, The Miami Herald reported that more than two thousand names showing up on the potential felons list were also on a list of ex-felons who had regained their voting rights after receiving clemency. A week later, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that the potential felons list had only 61 Hispanic names because the ethnic category was included in voter registration lists but not on Florida Department of Law Enforcement lists.

The paper found that while blacks make up 48 percent of the prison population and 46 percent of the purge list, Hispanics make up 11 percent of the prison population but less than 1 percent of the list.

And earlier this week, the Herald-Tribune reported that the company that produced a felon list in 2000 which was criticized because it contained thousands of people who were not felons knew as early as 1997 that the two databases could not be linked by race because of the Hispanic mismatch, and had told Department of State officials of the problem.

Hood's office continued to defend the list after the first article, but quickly reversed itself after widespread attention to the Hispanic problem.

Department spokeswoman Jenny Nash said that Hood wants the internal probes conducted "expeditiously" but also wants a "thorough" review.

She said there was no deadline for completion of the reports. Hood is "very anxious to get the answers to all of these questions," Nash said.

Democrats, meanwhile, continued pushing Bush and Hood to force Palm Beach and other counties that use touch-screen voting machines either to add printers to generate paper receipts or establish auditing procedures to make sure the machines actually record the votes that are cast.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, cited published reports that the touch-screen machines which were sold as virtually infallible improvements over the flawed "punch-card" systems that caused problems during the 2000 presidential election may be prone to "losing" votes.

"Taking action now... will enable state election officials to identify and address any problems before the November elections, and to increase public confidence in the integrity of the voting process," Simon said.

Hood has continued to support the accuracy and reliability of touch-screen systems.