It appears that the book you cited is full of lies:
Another Lie Liberals Told About Florida's Secretary of State
Katherine Harris Not Responsible for Felon Purges
By Timothy P. Carney
Despite the race-baiting claims of leading liberals, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was not responsible for her state’s botched attempt to purge felons from its voting rolls.
The purge was conducted pursuant to a 1998 Florida law that required the state to hire a private firm to compile a database of felons and dead people on the states’ voting lists. The contract for this database was not signed by Harris but by a the elections director, now a Democrat, who served under a previous secretary of state. The purge law required only that local county governments–not the secretary of state–remove appropriate names from the voting rolls. And the counties themselves, not the secretary of state’s office, were responsible for ensuring that the lists provided to them were accurate.
But on December 11, outside the U.S. Supreme Court, the Rev. Jackson told Human Events in a tape-recorded interview, "Eight thousand people, mostly African-Americans were sent notices that they were felons by Mrs. Harris–a private firm from Texas. None of them were." (Click here for the related story.)
A month later, after the Congressional Black Caucus tried to block certification of Florida’s Electoral College vote on the House floor, Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.) claimed that errors in the purge were not accidental. "Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris paid a private firm, ChoicePoint, $4 million to cleanse the voting rolls," said Waters, "and the firm used the state’s felon-ban to exclude 8,000 voters who had never committed a felony. ChoicePoint is a Republican outfit." (Click here for the full text of her comments.)
Contract Predated Harris
Some in the media have made similar claims, including the Tampa Tribune, which reported on March 2: "Under Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a private company was hired to purge convicted felons from voter registration lists prior to the recent elections but, to the shock of civil rights observers and election officials, the firm also purged legal voters from the lists."
To test this claim, Human Events reviewed relevant documents and spoke with state and county officials involved in the purges as well with executives at ChoicePoint. While mistakes were made at all levels of the process, their nature and magnitude have been grossly distorted, and Harris was not in any way responsible for them.
In its January 1 issue, the New Republic reported that the list-producing firm had been hired "months before the election." In fact, the law mandating the purge (Florida Statute 98.0975) was passed in the wake of a Miami mayoral race in which a judge found felons and dead people to have voted. The law stated: "By Aug. 15, 1998, the division [of elections] shall provide to each county supervisor of elections a list containing the name, address, date of birth" of every registered voter in that county who, "(a) Is deceased; (b) Has been convicted of a felony and has not had his or her civil rights restored."
The law also reads: "[I]n order to meet its obligations under this section, the division shall annually contract with a private entity." Accordingly, in 1998, Florida Division of Elections Director Ethel Baxter, now a registered Democrat, hired Database Technologies (DBT), which compiled a list that was distributed to the 67 county election chiefs. (DBT merged with ChoicePoint after compiling the 2000 list, and adopted ChoicePoint’s name.)
County officials were bound by law to verify this list and then to remove the names of verified felons and deceased voters.
Many critics of the purge have repeated the claim made by Salon.com in December 4 in a story headlined: "Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, from casting ballots." The website posted a correction 15 days later, noting that Katherine Harris was not the secretary of state when the contract was signed with DBT.
Current Florida Elections Division Director Clay Roberts told Human Events that Harris "had no role" in the process.
Similarly, Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections David Leahy said that he had no contact with Harris in carrying out his purge.
ChoicePoint Vice President James Lee said that Harris was briefed only on the contract that her office inherited. Harris’s office did not return a phone call on the matter.
So the basic facts are these: Harris did not sign the contract with the company that created the purge list. She did not carry out the purges. And the county officials who did carry out the purges–many of them Democrats–were supposed to verify the lists before using them.
Also dubious is Rep. Waters’ claim that the list company was a "Republican outfit." This also seems to stem from the Salon.com story. Two ChoicePoint officials Salon.com used to make this point were Rick Rozar and Ken Langone. Rozar has indeed given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republicans and is affiliated with ChoicePoint–but he had no affiliation with DBT. In fact, he founded a competitor to DBT–CDB Infotek–which was absorbed by ChoicePoint in 1999, a year before ChoicePoint merged with DBT, and a year after Baxter signed the state’s contract with DBT.
Langone, who is on the ChoicePoint board of directors, did serve on DBT’s board before the merger. Salon.com reported that he worked on New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign, but did not report that Langone’s political contributions included $1,000 to Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, and $2,000 each to Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Bob Graham (Fla.).
Jackson and others said the list firm was from Texas, but DBT is a Florida company and ChoicePoint is a Georgia company.
It has also been claimed that blacks were particularly "targeted" by the purge. Roberts, Leahy other county election supervisors, and a ChoicePoint executive all say they saw no evidence of racism in the lists.
Some critics made much of a statement by Hillsborough County Election Supervisor Pam Iorio that 54% of those on her list were black, although only 11.6% of her county is black. But the ratio of blacks to other ethnic groups on the list closely matched the ratio of blacks to other ethnic groups among the state’s felons. Forty-nine per cent of felons in Hillsborough prisons are black, and 54.8% of felons in state custody are black.
In Miami-Dade, about 65% of those on the felon list were black, according to Leahy, but in that county, too, the list roughly matched the local demographic breakdown of verified felons.
Another unproven charge is that voters were erroneously disenfranchised by the list. The list contained many names of individuals who were not felons, and some counties acted to remove these voters from the list. Some individuals have come forward describing "horror stories" of having to swear under oath that they were not felons in order to vote.
But no one has yet identified a single eligible voter who was actually and finally kept from voting by the purge.
On January 15, Rep. Corrine Brown (D.-Fla.) said on CNN, "I found other people, two or three young men that was there–they–when they went to their precinct, they were told they couldn’t vote because they was felons and they had never been arrested." But she did not name them on the air, and she did not return a phone call requesting further information.
Nonetheless, according to nearly all involved, Florida’s felon purge was deeply flawed. An initial list of alleged felons, which was produced in mid-1998 by a firm different from DBT, was so error-ridden many counties refused to use it.
The list that was later produced by DBT included nonfelons because Florida’s central voter file does not include Social Security numbers that could be used to differentiate between two people who have the same name. Thus, some voters who coincidentally had the same name as a felon were wrongly included on the purge list.
Because of these problems, many county election supervisors never carried out the purges, letting felons continue to vote rather than risk wrongly purging legal voters. The Florida legislature is now reviewing the purge statute, and the elections division has not renewed DBT’s contract.
humaneventsonline.com |
