Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed
The New York Times
July 10, 2004
By FORD FESSENDEN
Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up
with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are
recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls,
state officials acknowledged yesterday.As a result, voters identifying themselves
as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.
Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list,
only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000
are African-American.
About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic,
and about 11 percent as black.
In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the
2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect
could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic,
while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.
Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied
any partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it
had been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit.
"This was absolutely unintentional," said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman
for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of
Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. "The matching criteria were
approved by several interested parties in the lawsuit, and the court. I
don't know how it got by all those people without anyone noticing."
Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: "The governor
is complying with the law and complying with the settlement.
Recognizing now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State
is looking into the options."
Anita Earls, one of the lawyers for plaintiffs in the civil rights suit,
said state officials had not given them the kind of access to data that might
have uncovered the flaw.
The method uses race as one of several factors in determining
whether a felon has registered to vote. If a voter's first name, last name and
date of birth are the same as those of a convicted felon but the race
is different, the name is not put on the list for potential purging.
But the database of felons has only five variables for race:
white, black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic
whose name and birth date matched a felon's would be left off the
purge list unless his race was listed as unknown.
A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,
Kristen Perezluha, said the felon database used F.B.I. criteria for judging
race and so never listed Hispanic.
Florida undertook a similar purge of voter rolls in 2000, but that
list was shown to include the names of many who were not felons. The new
effort at such a purge, begun by Governor Bush's administration
in May, was supposed to be free of those problems. But after a state judge
last week ordered the release of the current list, it became clear
that thousands of felons who had been granted clemency were still on it.
Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the
last straw. "Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to
voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, "
or they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's
unacceptable.''
"The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the
list out and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election."
Some county election supervisors have said they are reluctant
to use the state's list to purge the names of any voters. The law leaves that
responsibility to the county officials, but it is unclear how many will use it.
"It's an impossible task to do properly," said Ion Sancho, the supervisor
in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle.
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday,
by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the
problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data,
state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of
felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.
Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000
voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately
one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion
of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in
party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025
Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest
unaffiliated.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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