Remember back in 2000 when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris teamed up to
purge thousands of names from the Florida voter roll? Remember how it turned out
many of those names were African-Americans, who voted 93% for Gore? Remember how thousands of those names were people who should not have been purged from the rolls--who were not convicted felons at all? In other words, remember how Jeb Bush fixed the election in Florida in 2000?
Yeah, well, he's doing it again.
From an editorial in the Thursday edition of The Oregonian:
Florida is one of eight states that do not restore voting rights of convicted felons after they complete their sentences. Following the 2000 election, BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast described in "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" how Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris improperly purged tens of thousands of Floridians -- mostly African American voters in Democratic-leaning precincts -- from the voter rolls because they appeared on lists of convicted felons.
Palast's investigative tour de force showed how Harris scandalously failed to verify that those denied the vote were the same people who had been convicted of felonies. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights later confirmed that most of those whose names were erased were innocent and should have been allowed to vote.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has announced "a surprise new purge" of the state's voter rolls targeting 40,000 to 50,000 of its own citizens, Palast told The Oregonian last week. The lists are "complete junk," he said, and gave examples:
An election supervisor, a Republican tipster, called to say that "within a minute" he found a county court clerk with a clean record on the purge list and it seems likely that only a handful of names on the list should be there.
Florida is refusing to require a match of names with Social Security numbers or other methods that reliably could avoid wrongly removing voters' civil rights. The Justice Department must move to ensure that Jeb Bush's purge procedures are reliable. It must protect the rights of black voters in Florida.
Good Christ. They're doing it again and this editorial was the first I heard about it. Once I got home from work, I did some poking around and came up with
this article from the Palm Beach Post, which gives some more information:
The state Division of Elections recently identified 47,000 suspected felons it says should be cleansed from the voter rolls under a law that bans convicts from voting until their civil rights are restored by the governor and Cabinet.
Guidelines adopted by the legislature after the 2000 election require the Florida Department of State to forward the list to county supervisors for final verification.
During that presidential election, at least 1,100 eligible voters in Florida were wrongly purged from the rolls before the election because of a list then generated by a private company under a contract with the state.
Meanwhile, more than 3,000 felons were not prevented from casting ballots because 20 supervisors, skeptical of the list, ignored it.
The law requires supervisors to send certified letters inviting people on the felon list to set the record straight. Elections offices also can offer a formal hearing. After that, a legal notice in a local newspaper is the last safeguard before a name is removed from voter rolls.
This year, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement provided the names to state elections officials, and they were checked at the Office of Executive Clemency and Office of Vital Statistics.
But given the state's rocky history of trying to expunge ineligible voters, supervisors are nervous.
"Almost 99 percent of the time, the letters we send out to voters come back 'address undeliverable,'" LePore said. "Then what do you do?"
Okay, this is required by Florida law. Just the fact that it is happening does not mean that there is something sinister going on. But the editorial from
The Oregonian suggests that this is another very faulty list. Clearly, there are many people being included who should not be kept from voting. There is no reason that Florida law should not require a greater effort to be made to make sure those being purged
should be purged. Simply requiring a letter to be sent--especially when an up-to-date address is so often not on file--is not nearly a strong enough measure to prevent improper purging.
The simple reality is that these purges hurt the Democrats much more than the Republicans. It is suspicious, then, that Jeb Bush is not willing to push for much stricter oversight of the process and more safeguards in place to prevent legitimate voters from being dumped from the rolls. One might get the idea that he was trying to tilt the election in favor of his brother.
Which, of course, would almost surely be correct.
Florida is incredibly important in this election and Kerry has a real chance at winning the state in November. However, he can only win it in a fair, clean election. It seems that Jeb Bush is doing everything he possibly can to put a halt to such an election and instead rig it for his brother, as he did in 2000. For that reason, I am assuming that Kerry will lose in Florida. I think a fair election would very possibly give him the state, but I'm skeptical a fair election will occur this November.
Luckily, this current voter purge is getting some more scrutiny than the one in 2000 did. However, it still has not been big news. That could change, though, now that CNN is suing to gain access to the purge list:
The state Monday denied a CNN request for a copy of the list of up to 48,000 people. These people, according to the state, could be ineligible to vote because they are felons or have multiple registrations -- or have died since the last election.
The county election boards have been asked to review the list to make sure the people are correctly identified as individuals who should be denied the right to vote.
The state said that only government officials, candidates for office, and political parties can be provided copies of such records under state law.
CNN as well as members of the general public were invited to view the documents in the Florida Division of Elections headquarters in Tallahassee, on the condition that there be no photocopying or note-taking.
"Unless people look at the list and see their names and know that it's wrong, then they could end up in a situation where they don't have the right to vote," said Tampa attorney Gregg D. Thomas of the law firm Holland & Knight, who is representing CNN in the matter. "It is incredible that information this important to a constitutional right, the right to vote, is not freely and openly disseminated."
CNN filed suit Friday in a state circuit court in Tallahassee, Florida.
[...]
"Florida's 2000 felon purge program resulted in over 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised," said Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho in a written statement. "When asked for assurances that the [2004 felon list] was 90 percent accurate -- the minimum level local supervisors of elections requested for such a list -- we were told that it was better than the 2000 list, with no data to support its accuracy."
A Florida state official acknowledged to CNN that the 2000 list contained errors -- in particular that it included felons convicted in other states, who are eligible to vote in Florida.
The 2004 list, according to the official, has been corrected to include only felons convicted in-state.
County elections officials were provided with the new list, as well as a list of voters who were possibly wrongfully denied the right to vote in 2000, and were asked to review both lists and submit any corrections to the state.
This is a good start. The lawsuit helps put some attention on what is going on in Florida. Furthermore, if CNN wins the suit, they will have the opportunity to really scrutinize and publish the list, hopefully reducing the number of people improperly purged from the Florida voter roll. However, this lawsuit does not even begin to put the issue to rest.
Things are so bad down in Florida that the improper 2000 purgings have not yet been corrected. From a must-read article in the Miami Herald:
With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.
Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.
Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida's largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.
Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far -- more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.
The fact that many counties have yet to add voters back to the rolls comes at the same time that election supervisors across Florida are being asked to look at purging more than 47,000 voters that the state has identified as possible felons who are ineligible to vote under state law.
At this point, it may be too late to get improperly purged voters back on the list. Election officials are gearing up for November and are working on vetting the new list and purging those on it. According to the article, some election officials did not even know about the state's request to check to see if there are voters who should be put back on the list. So it is likely that thousands of voters who were improperly removed in 2000 will still be off the voter roll in 2004.
This is outrageous. It is a perversion of democracy. And they're getting away with it.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Kerry to win Florida. It looks like the fix is already in.
(Originally posted on my blog, Nightmares For Sale)