Florida unveils changes to keep felons from voting
By George Bennett
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 02, 2005
CLEARWATER — By using photo and signature matches and online court records for the first time, Florida elections officials said Thursday they have come up with a more accurate system to target felons for removal from the state's voter rolls.
The state Division of Elections unveiled the new system here at a conference of county elections supervisors. The county chiefs, who use the state's data to determine whether to purge voters, seemed optimistic that the new procedures will prevent the widespread errors that led Florida to scrap its list of 48,000 potential felons in 2004.
The Florida Constitution imposes a lifetime voting ban on any person convicted of a felony unless that person has been granted clemency. The policy, among the most restrictive in the nation, was upheld last month when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case claiming the felon ban is racially discriminatory.
Although it's illegal for felons to register to vote in Florida, many do so anyway. Attempts to eject them from voter rolls have caused controversy because the state has wrongly identified many non-felons as candidates for removal.
The Division of Elections says its new procedures should eliminate most instances of an eligible voter being identified as a possible felon.
"It will be a very tight match. It will be very specific. It will not be as broad a net as before," said Sandy Brill, the project manager for a new statewide voter registration database that will be launched Jan. 1 to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.
In the past, the division generated a list of potential felons by comparing voter rolls with Florida Department of Law Enforcement data on felony convictions and Office of Executive Clemency lists of people whose rights had been restored. State elections officials did not review the computer-generated lists of potential felons before sending them to county elections supervisors.
Without photo or signature records, eligible voters could be flagged if their names were similar to the names — or aliases — of felons. And FDLE records often can show a felony conviction when charges were actually reduced to misdemeanors or adjudication was withheld, Brill said.
Now, Brill said, after the initial match of voter lists and FDLE data, employees from a newly created bureau in the Division of Elections also will match signatures from voter registration applications to signatures on driver license records. Driver license photos also will be compared with Department of Corrections inmate photos.
Once the division is confident it has zeroed in on the right person, the FDLE felony information will be reviewed against online court records to verify that the person actually was convicted of a felony. Only then will the information be sent to county elections supervisors, who have the final responsibility for verifying it and starting the process of removing voters.
Brill demonstrated some of the new computer searches to the elections supervisors Thursday. Initial reviews were positive.
"I actually feel better about the felons today than I ever have before," said Polk County Elections Supervisor Lori Edwards. She said the felon information she has received from the state in the past has been so riddled with false matches and other errors that she often ignored it.
"I'm optimistic," said Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson. "Although I do not concur with the current policy of not automatically restoring felons' rights, I think we're going to have a greatly improved system."
An attorney involved in the failed effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the felon voting ban applauded the use of photo and signature records.
"It sounds very promising, or at least much more of a reliable system than they had before, which was grossly unreliable," said Justin Levitt, an associate counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
A george_bennett@pbpost.com
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