http://www

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/5min/10250475.htm

Nov. 23, 2004

ELECTIONS

Felons list audit faults state

A new state audit criticized how Florida put together a central voter database and a felons list that was sent to election supervisors this year.

BY Gary Fineout

gfineout@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - A new audit shows that Florida's attempt to rid the voting rolls of felons this past election season was marred by lax oversight by the Department of State, which failed to follow legal settlements and relied on seriously flawed data when it put together the controversial felons list.

The audit, conducted by Kirby Mole, the inspector general who reports directly to Secretary of State Glenda Hood, says no evidence exists to suggest that state officials deliberately intended to purge black voters more aggressively than Hispanic voters.

In July, Hood killed the felons list -- intended to be used by elections officials to purge voters -- after news reports pointed out problems with the list, among them that it contained too few Hispanics.

Hood did not dispute the audit results Monday. Instead, she put the blame on an overburdened department and said she is taking steps to make sure that this year's problems with the list will not be repeated when Florida unveils a new central voter registration system in 2006.

''There was nothing intentional,'' Hood said. ``Everyone was trying very hard to get things in place and ready. There was just some management controls that were not in place. That will not be the situation in the future.''

Hood said she will set up an office in her department to handle voter registration. One of its main responsibilities will be to create a new centralized voting database that is required under federal law. She also plans to have separate companies help design the software and test it.

Florida is one of a handful of states that bans former prisoners from voting unless they apply to have their civil rights restored. An attempt to rid voting rolls of felons in 2000 came under fire after it was revealed that the list drawn up by a private company for the state contained deep flaws.

In 2001, state legislators agreed to spend up to $2 million to create a central voter database that was supposed to weed out felons, deceased people and duplicate registrations from the state's list of nearly 10 million voters. The Department of State ultimately hired Accenture to help create the database. The firm received $2.2 million before its contract was terminated by the state.

Efforts by the state elections division to draw up a list of more than 48,000 felons came under scrutiny when the list was first given to counties in May. The Herald discovered more than 2,000 voters on the list had had their civil rights restored, many of them Democrats. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that Hispanics, who often vote Republican, had largely been left off the list.

ALTERED CRITERIA

The inspector general said that the flaw stemmed primarily from a 2002 decision by Clay Roberts, then the head of the elections division, to alter the matching criteria used to draw up the felons list, despite warnings from Accenture.

It was Roberts who ordered that arrest data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement not be used if the race and gender of a felon did not match exactly the race and gender listed on voting records. The FDLE does not list Hispanic as a race, so the names of Hispanic felons weren't included in the list.

Both Hood and Roberts, who now works for Attorney General Charlie Crist, insist that the 2002 decision was made to ensure the list was drawn as narrowly as possible to avoid including someone on the list who didn't belong on it.

''The changes were designed to make the list tighter,'' said Roberts, who was interviewed by the inspector general. ``There was an unintended consequence since FDLE didn't use Hispanic as a race.''

The inspector general's report suggests that race should be eliminated as a matching criteria in the future.

OTHER CONCLUSIONS

Other key audit findings:

� The department relied on flawed data from the Office of Executive Clemency when drawing up the felons list. For example, the office did not initially turn over the names of more than 5,000 felons whose civil rights were restored before 1977 because the office did not have birth dates for those people. In June, when asked about this possible flaw, state officials denied that it was a problem.

� The department did not ensure that some changes to the central voter database were approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, which must sign off on any new procedures that affect voting rights of minorities.

� The department did not always comply with a legal agreement it reached in 2002 with the NAACP over how to use the central voter database and the felons list.

� The department failed to keep a close watch over the project and Accenture. The audit notes that the inspector general could not find all the required documentation for the project.

http://www.miami.com