http://tampatrib.com/MGB7TQUZ5VD.html
June
7, 2004
Delays, Purge Hit Voter
Rolls
By
William March, wmarch@tampatrib.com
[Photo
by: JAY NOLAN]
Willie
Johnson, 69, can no longer vote because of criminal records from the 1950's.
Johnson says he's been voting for the passed 30 years but has been unable to
since 2000.
TAMPA
- For the second straight presidential election, Florida's law against former
felons voting, a law grounded in Old South racism, may prevent thousands of
people from voting. Some of those people may be legally entitled to vote.
Others won't be able to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles of the state's
clemency process to get their rights restored in time for the election.
But
the state government is concentrating on removing as many former felons from
voting rolls as possible, even though critics charge that it risks
disenfranchising some who are legally entitled to vote. Meanwhile, those
critics charge, the state is dragging its feet on restoring those wrongly
removed from voter rolls in 2000.
Florida
is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons from voting
unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of having their
rights restored.
That
law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000
presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly
thousands of voters - no one knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls
in 2000, some wrongly, because of errors in a state "purge list" of
former felons.
Today,
as the 2004 election nears:
*
More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights
restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they
weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and
the list is growing, not shrinking.
*
Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never
committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put
back on the rolls.
*
A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional
and affects up to 600,000 people.
Despite
all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67
counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed
felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again.
Some
supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge
without the same kind of errors as in 2000.
Legally
purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from
an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for
this election - or are turned away on Election Day.
The
vast majority of them are black and would be likely to
vote Democratic.
In
Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but
make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.
Asked
why a new purge list is going out less than six months before the election,
Secretary of State Glenda Hood said it's part of
establishing a statewide voter list, as required by the state's 2001 election
reform law. The law was passed in the wake of the disputed presidential vote.
"The
legislation mandated that as soon as this process [of identifying improperly
registered names] was complete, the information be sent out," said Hood, a
Republican and an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush.
But
Hood acknowledged "there is no particular time line" in the law for
sending purge lists to county elections supervisors.
Hood's
staff didn't follow through on a promise to have a staff attorney call a
reporter to discuss precisely what part of the new law requires that the list
go out now.
When
news of the new purge list broke about three weeks ago, it drew a chorus of
anger from civil rights advocates who had sued the state over the 2000 election
problems.
"Frankly,
the state should first fix the problems with people who were erroneously thrown
off in 2000 before they start on another purge," said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way
Foundation, a liberal-oriented advocacy group.
State
officials are seeking to keep the new purge list secret, but CNN is suing to
get a copy. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, and several news organizations
including The Tampa Tribune plan to join the lawsuit.
They
Were Purged
Derek
Graham, Willie Johnson and Jeffrey Key, who are black and of Tampa, were three
of the thousands of people legally removed from the voter rolls in 2000. They
have past felony records and hadn't had their rights restored.
But
all three also say they had been registered, and voting, for years before being
turned away in 2000.
"When
they release you, they don't tell you that you have to go through a process to
receive those rights back," said Key, 40, a Progress Village homeowner
with two grown children, one in college.
Key
served four years in the 1980s for armed robbery and got a job on work release
with the same printing company where he is now a supervisor. After being turned
away from the polls in 2000, it took him 2 1/2 years to get his rights
restored.
Johnson,
69, a retired truck driver, served a short sentence in the 1950s for breaking
and entering, but had been voting since 1962.
He
has sent an application to Tallahassee but doesn't expect to be able to vote
this year.
"If
I did wrong, it's my part," he said. "But I did my time. I haven't
been in trouble since; I've been working ever since."
Graham,
38, who operates a street sweeper for the city of Tampa, remembers voting for
the Community Investment Tax in 1996. It has been 17 years since the drug
possession charge landed him an eight-month sentence. He applied 10 months ago
to have his rights restored. He hasn't heard back.
Graham
and Johnson are among 43,847 Floridians waiting to have their rights restored
as of June 30, 2003.
That
number has gone up from 6,437 in June 2001. As part of the settlement of
litigation prompted by the 2000 election, the state sent restoration applications
to thousands of former felons, which swamped the Executive Clemency Office
staff.
Spokeswoman
Jane Tillman said the office hoped the number would decline this year, but that
depended on the Legislature approving 20 new positions for investigators. It
didn't.
The
applicants may have a long wait.
David
Scott Stiles of Dover, 34, a truck driver, registered to vote - legally, he
thought - after getting out of prison for motorcycle theft in 1998. In 2000, he
was purged.
Stiles applied for rights restoration in
September 2002 but was just told, nearly two years later, that his case won't be
acted on in time for him to vote this year.
"I'm
a felon, I screwed up, but I paid for what I did," he said. "Now it's
time for the state to do what they're supposed to do."
One
reason these voters didn't know they weren't legally entitled to vote is that
the state of Florida didn't produce felon purge lists before 1999. The law was
enforced on a haphazard basis, as county clerks of court sent criminal records
to local election supervisors.
The
Legislature required state officials to begin aggressively enforcing the law
after a corrupt city election in Miami in 1997, contaminated mainly by
fraudulent absentee ballots. Investigations also found former felons voting in
that race.
In
2000, the purge list attempted to capture the names missed over the years.
It
also captured the names of at least 2,120 former felons who moved to Florida
after having their rights restored in other states.
Under
a 1998 court decision, the restoration should have applied in Florida. But the
names were removed anyway, along with some people whose rights had been
restored in Florida, and thousands like Graham,
Johnson, Key and Stiles, who had never had their rights restored because they
didn't know they needed to.
Something
Really Wonderful
Florida's
felon disenfranchisement law dates from 1868, when the state produced a new
constitution to win readmission to the Union after the Civil War.
According
to Florida historian Jerrell Shofner,
it was added by a political faction that sought the support of former
Confederates.
A
member of that faction later boasted that the new state constitution prevented
the state from coming under the influence of black people, Shofner
said.
The
Brennan Center for Justice, a legal advocacy group associated with New York
University Law School, is suing to have the provision declared
unconstitutional. A trial court judge in Miami dismissed the lawsuit, but it
was reinstated in a split decision by a three- judge appeals court panel in
December. The state has asked for review by the full court.
Another
post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter criteria in
producing its felon purge lists.
The
lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In 2000,
state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names
as possible, even knowing it would result in "false positives" -
people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former
counsel of the Division of Elections.
They
relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches before removing
the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to complete the
task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent letters to everyone on
their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or couldn't provide proof
they weren't felons.
That
resulted in many people being wrongly removed; no one knows how many. Under the
litigation settlement, each county is supposed to report completion of its
efforts to find and re-register those wrongly removed. Only 33 of the 67
counties have done so.
Hillsborough
Election Supervisor Buddy Johnson said 533 people were incorrectly listed as
ineligible former felons on Hillsborough's rolls and said those purged have
been re-registered.
Many
election officials, including Kurt Browning in Pasco County, don't see the need
for disenfranchising former felons to begin with.
"If
they're going to be released, we want them to be assimilated back into
society," said Browning, Pasco's elections supervisor. "If they get a
job, pay taxes, why shouldn't they have the right to vote?"
Election
Supervisors Concerned
Hood
said the statewide voter list required by the 2001 reform law was finished on
time, in May 2002. But settling the NAACP lawsuit and devising the new matching
criteria delayed production of the felon purge list until now, she said.
She
said the names are considered "potential matches," which the
supervisor must check for accuracy.
"A
supervisor is going to make absolutely certain that the name should be removed,"
and won't "unless they have absolute proof," she said.
That
means this year's process will be different from 2000, said State Department
spokeswoman Jenny Nash, because the burden of proof is on the supervisor to
make sure the voter is a felon, not on the voter to prove innocence.
But
the supervisors themselves aren't so sure.
Deciding
whether a voter has a criminal record can be a tricky investigative task,
involving names, Social Security numbers and birth dates that are similar but
don't quite match, and checks of state or nationwide criminal records.
"I'm
trying to figure out by what authority, why we have to investigate this list of
people," Browning said. "It's not my job. I'm not an investigator. I
don't know what I'm doing with this stuff."
Other
supervisors, including Ion Sancho of Leon County,
have said they don't have the staff or money for investigations or the mailings
or advertisements intended to notify affected voters.
According
to instructions published on the State Department Web site, if a voter fails to
respond to a letter within 30 days, the supervisor is required to remove the
name from the list. Browning said that appears to leave the burden of proof on
the voter, just as in 2000. "I'm trying to figure out what's different,"
he said.
"If
I got a letter saying you might be a felon, I'm not going to let that
sit," Browning said. But some may not respond because of address changes,
misunderstanding or other errors.
"For
whatever reason, the assumption is that if they don't respond, maybe they are a
felon," he said.
Asked
whether supervisors are free to ignore the lists, Hood responded, "I think
the supervisors are going to be very cautious that they don't eliminate any
voter from the list if they don't have absolute proof."
Reporter
William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761.
This
story can be found at: http://tampatrib.com/MGB7TQUZ5VD.html
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