Blacks facing unfair obstacles

BY ALAINA C. BEVERLY

For black and brown voters in Florida, participation in our democracy must seem like a game of high-stakes roulette in which the state keeps stacking the odds against them.

In the latest twist, Florida reacted to a state court ruling which required it to help individuals who have completed their sentences to navigate the process to restore their voting rights by complicating that process. The state eliminated a form that former offenders are to mail to the Office of Executive Clemency in Tallahassee to initiate the restoration process. Now individuals must wait for notification from the state that they have not qualified for automatic restoration of right before they can contact the clemency office to request a hearing.

This is the latest barrier erected by Florida to the full participation of its black and brown citizens.

Before the 2000 elections, Florida used inaccurate criteria and flawed methods to create a ''felon purge'' list that led to the unlawful disfranchisement of thousands of voters, mostly African Americans. At least 2,000 of the individuals on the purge list were convicted in other states but had served their sentences and already had their voting rights restored by law (in those other states). Nevertheless, they were scrubbed from Florida's voting rolls. Many individuals who had never been convicted of a crime were on the list because of faulty methods of matching names on the voter lists with names of individuals convicted of felony offenses.

In 2001, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and a coalition of civil-rights organizations filed a lawsuit challenging many of Florida's voting procedures, under federal laws including the Voting Rights Act. That suit questioned the ways in which Florida identified persons potentially ineligible to vote because of a prior felony conviction. The NAACP vs. Harris case led to a settlement that required Florida to match name and race of individuals on the voter rolls and criminal conviction lists before including them on the felon purge list.

Purge list was inaccurate

It only recently came to light that, at the time of the settlement, Florida officials knew but did not reveal that its criminal convictions database did not include race information for Latinos. As a result, the purge list prepared in accordance with the settlement procedure was under-inclusive and inaccurate. In addition, as The Herald reported on July 2, ``at least 2,119 of those names . . . shouldn't [have been] on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process.''

Florida state officials finally agreed to withdraw the flawed purge list for the November elections. But county election supervisors are still required by state law to remove from the voting rolls persons convicted of felonies who have not had their rights restored. Recent reports indicate that, with the election rapidly approaching and little guidance from the state, some supervisors are relying on the flawed state list anyway, in possible violation of federal law.

Excluding minority voters

Despite its promises to improve election procedures, losing another lawsuit over its clemency process, receiving continued criticism from civil-rights groups and being the subject of a series of embarrassing news stories, Florida continues to adopt and implement election procedures that exclude minority voters in general and African Americans in particular from participating fully in its political process. The right to vote is a fundamental part of citizenship, regardless of sex, class, color or partisanship that cannot be abridged by state agencies or local election officials.

We will enforce the protections available under federal law to remove the barriers that Florida keeps stacking up, so that all eligible voters, and especially citizens of color, have equal access to the democratic process.