Report: Bush ignored advice to 'pull the plug' on voter purge

Associated Press    16 October 2004

 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to "pull the plug" on a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices in spite of a warning from leery state officials, according to a published report Saturday.

Computer experts in the Department of State and Florida Department of Law Enforcement were concerned about the software program that matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the purge list of 48,000 names, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.

Jeff Long, a computer expert with the FDLE, told his supervisor in a May 4 e-mail that Paul Craft, the Department of State's point man on the purge list, had recommended it be scrapped.

"The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live' with it this weekend," Long wrote in an e-mail obtained by the newspaper after a public records request.

Two months later, Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database after acknowledging 2,500 ex-felons on the list had their voting rights restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error when the two state databases were merged.

Florida is one of only a handful of states that do not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons when they complete their sentence. The purge by election officials has been a hot-button issue since the 2000 presidential election when many citizens discovered at the polls they weren't allowed to vote.

Bush told the newspaper Friday that he was never warned about any problems before the list was released.

Bush spokeswoman Jill Bratina said Saturday that the allegation that Bush ignored warnings was "absolutely false."

"It's also irrelevant because the list isn't being used," Bratina added.

Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Hood, said Craft never made recommendations to Bush about the purge list. She added that Long's e-mail dealt with "a specific component with the central voter database that had nothing to do with the reliability of the original data source."

U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Florida chairman of John Kerry's presidential campaign, said the report shows how far Bush is willing to go to ensure his brother's re-election.

"Early voting starts in Florida on Monday," the Miami Democrat said in a statement Saturday. "By the time the polls open, Jeb Bush and the Bush campaign need to come clean about their involvement in this sad spectacle."

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., and the voter-rights organization People For the American Way Foundation both said Long's message proves Bush had ties to the flawed effort to purge felons.

"It's the smoking e-mail," American Way president Ralph G. Neas said in a statement. Neas is asking U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate.

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