salon.com
Florida's 'Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP
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Voteless in Florida
motherjones.com
guardianunlimited.co.uk
But Ms Harris's list went further than simply upholding a 19th-century law. It included several thousand people who should not have been disqualified, either because they had gone through the arduous process of having their rights restored or because they had never been convicted of a felony in the first place.
The list was so riddled with errors that Palm Beach and Duval election boards simply ignored it, leading to Republican allegations that more than 300 ex-felons had voted in those counties. But their numbers appear to be far outweighed by those wrongly disenfranchised elsewhere.
When he was 23, Wallace McDonald fell asleep on a bench in Tampa waiting for a bus. He was arrested for vagrancy and obliged to pay for his misdemeanour by working on a municipal rubbish truck. Disgusted with his sentence, the young McDonald walked off the job, an offence for which he was fined $30.
That was in 1959. Forty-one years on, Mr McDonald received a letter from the Hillsborough County election supervisor, Pam Iorio, informing him that as an ex-felon his name had been removed from the voters' roll.
"I could not believe it, after voting for all these years since the 50s, without a problem," he said, pointing out that even by Florida's harsh standards his offence did not amount to a felony. "I knew something was unfair about that. To be able to vote all your life then to have somebody reach in a bag and take some technicality that you can't vote," Mr McDonald said. "Why now? Something's wrong."
He is in good company. The Rev Willie Dixon received a full pardon for drug offences in 1985, and has since become a youth leader and bible preacher, a pillar of the Tampa black community who has voted in every presidential election. Until he received one of Ms Iorio's letters.
Kelvin King never received a letter. He was also released in 1985, after becoming another statistic in the drug war. He got his registration card and had voted in the three presidential polls held since his release from jail. This November, he was ejected from a polling station after his name turned up on the blacklist.
"The lady on the desk just told me I was a felon. It was a bit of a shock," Mr King said. "I suppose I was disgusted at myself for what I had done in the past, but I assumed it had been taken care of."
In her Tampa offices, a defensive Ms Iorio, a Democrat, pointed the finger of blame at Tallahassee. "Yes, there were errors on the list," she said. "There were instances of mistaken identity and people who should not have been on it. Something doesn't work right in the system."
But the county election supervisor defended her use of Ms Harris's list. Anyone wrongly listed as a felon had ample opportunity to appeal, she argued.
Mr Dixon did manage to have his criminal taint removed but Mr McDonald was not so fortunate, despite the best efforts of his lawyer. Mr King never had a chance.
It is not just ex-convicts who found themselves excluded. Civil rights groups have been inundated with complaints from mainly black voters that they had not found their names on the voters' roll.
Again, many of the disenfranchised appear to have fallen prey to the Florida government's zeal in applying electoral regulations. Under federal law, states can purge citizens from the rolls if they fail to participate in two consecutive federal elections and if letters sent to their address are returned.
But once more, Ms Harris's office appears to have gone beyond the letter of the law, ordering a comprehensive purge of the rolls in October, provoking several hundred complaints from would-be voters who said their names had been erased despite a consistent voting record. |
