The 2000 Felon List
How did the debacle come about?
It started with the 1997 Miami mayoral race, which had some dead people voting.
Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It ... stated that "the division shall annually contract a private entity" to maintain a list of [deceased, mentally incompetent] and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project ...
Three companies were in the bidding for this contract. Two submitted bids of under $10,000. One, Database Technologies (DBT) bid $4 million. Guess who got the job?
DBT supported -- and was highly praised by -- a now defunct conservative advocacy group called the Voting Integrity Project (V.I.P.). Touting "voting rights", V.I.P. sprang into action in 1996 in response to the national "motor voter" law, which passed in 1993. The law had increased voter registration nationwide by an estimated seven million, with minorities consituting a disproportionate number of those new voters.
It turned out, as we all know, that the list contained a lot of non-felons. A lot of people noticed and were disturbed. Even so, the state wanted more names on the list.
James Lee, the chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says the state did just the opposite [of correcting the problem of non-felons on the list]. "Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match," says Lee. "Because after the first year, they weren't getting enough names."
The "matching criteria" were incredibly loose:
MIddle initials didn't need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around; Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah -- same thing.
This is insanity! WHY couldn't they match social security numbers -- why bother with names at all?
Moreover, they were working from a list provided by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that included more than just felons:
This was a database of arrests, not convictions. Thousands were designated as "adjudication withheld" -- meaning no conviction. Others were only misdemeanors. In sum, says Sancho [Leon County elections supervisor] "they pulled up the entire universe of all potential felons that they found in everybody's database."
The article then asks:
Why was the state prepared to pay $4 million for such shoddy work? A class-action suit brought by the N.A.A.C.P. and a number of African-American voters in 2001 accused DBT, Harris, and several individual supervisors of disenfranchising black voters ... The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future.
On to the Future
DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida's elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn't have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000 -- more than a third of DBT's May 2000 list ...
More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush's government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida's rolls have been reinstated in any formal way.
By September 2003, the state had sent out a "filtered list" to the state election supervisors for them to "re-evaluate" who should be restored to the voting rolls.
No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.
Then, as we now know, they came out with a new felon list -- 48,000 names this time.
For Ian Sancho, it started another firestorm. "I asked my staff, 'Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?' They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren't felons," Sancho says, storming about his office.
The legislature had explicitly mandated that no private company should be entrusted with the work of producing such a list. However,
... the new list had been prepared with the help of Accenture. Fomerly known as Andersen Consulting, once the consulting arm of Andersen Worldwide, the former parent company of Arthur Andersen, Accenture has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida.
The legislature had decreed that the association of court clerks should be responsible for the database used to draw up the list of felons, but the state ignored them, saying the clerks were too expensive.
According to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a recently uncovered email showed that, in fact, the clerks of the courts had agreed to meet the price the state wanted. "The Division of Elections wanted control," concludes Sancho.
It required a lawsuit by CNN to get access to the list by the media.
It took the Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.
Then, of course, there was the issue of the non-appearance of Hispanics on the list. Of 48,000 names, only 16 were Hispanic in a state with a population that's 17% Hispanic.
Why were so few Hispanics on the felon list? Because the voter registration application identified Hispanics as such; the F.D.L.E. database did not, so when the two failed to match, the Hispanic ex-felons were excluded from the purge list.
An ill-conceived INNER JOIN that went awry, or something more sinister? The article does not really say. However,
... according to Jeff Long, a veteran F.D.L.E. official, starting in 1999 with the preparation of the 2000 purge list, his officed informed the sectretary of state's office how the F.D.L.E. matched for race. "We provided an extract of what's in our criminal databases, which included the categories for race," says Long. "The extract listed five categories for race. Those codes do not include an 'H' [for "Hispanic"]."
So at the least, gross incompetence.
The state was forced to dump the list.
In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November.
This is the scariest statement in the whole article to me. I mean, here it is almost October -- they have scrapped the list they were going to use because its worthlessness was outed by the media -- WHAT are they going to use? How are they going to determine who are felons and who are not? How can we prevent the further disenfranchisement of many who would almost certainly vote Democratic???
This article makes it frighteningly clear that the problems of 2000 have not been resolved or even improved much in Florida -- that "another Florida" is not just a possibility but a likelihood if the race is close.
(There's also a section in the article on electronic voting -- but that's another diary! :) )
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