Counties to be told 1,300 felons have voting rights

By Paige St. John, The News-Press Tallahassee Bureau
  August 10, 2004

TALLAHASSEE — Florida election officials are preparing to tell county election supervisors to restore voting rights to as many as 1,300 people wrongfully removed from the rolls four years ago.

“Do I think this should have happened sooner? Yes. But I’m happy it is finally happening at all,” said Elliot Mincberg, general counsel for People for the American Way, one of several civil rights groups that sued Florida over its 2000 voter purge.

As part of court-sanctioned mediation, attorneys for the Secretary of State have agreed to provide county election officials with the names of out-of-state felons who likely never should have lost the right to vote, Mincberg said.

Monday, Hood’s office provided drafts of the letters it intends to send to county election supervisors, as early as this week.

At least two other civil rights groups must also sign off on the letters to settle the mediation. Mincberg said his group had agreed to the current drafts and “the letters could go out as early as tomorrow.”

He said the agreement marks a reversal of the Secretary of State’s office from four years earlier.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood’s staff late Monday, however, said the letters Mincberg saw are still being revised.

“It’s still in draft form and revisions are still being made by all the parties,” said Hood's spokeswoman, Jenny Nash. “The end result is to offer clear guidance to the supervisors. Our goal is to make revisions that will add clarity to the process.”

A 2002 court settlement between Secretary of State Glenda Hood and the NAACP promised that Florida would work to identify and restore voting rights to thousands of voters wrongfully purged before that presidential election.

In March, those civil rights groups forced the state back into mediation, accusing Hood’s office of dragging its feet.

The state in September identified 1,451 who committed felony crimes in states that do not strip them of their voting rights.

But Hood’s office never told county supervisors about most of them — even though state files show the Secretary of State had in hand a list of more than 500 Florida voters who had completed their Ohio sentences.

“It’s a more complicated process than, you walk out of jail and you get your rights back,” said Nash.

But in Ohio, that is the process.

“As soon as they leave the (prison) doors, they can vote,” said David Singleton, executive director of the Ohio-based Prison Advocacy Reform Center.

Mincberg said Florida officials sent him two letters to go to election supervisors, one concerning those the state knows have had their rights restored and another where information is less certain.

That second letter instructs supervisors to err on the side of the citizen’s right to vote, without overtly telling them to restore those voters to the rolls.

“It was our view they ought to be more positive” in telling county supervisors what action to take, he said.