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New discrepancies found in Florida felon count

The Miami Herald headline says State sued over voters' list, which is true, but the headline appears to be referring to the CNN lawsuit, scheduled to be heard today in Tallahassee.

The Herald article is reporting on some new discrepancies found in lists of Florida felons who have had their civil rights restored. The Brennan Center for Justice may be joining the CNN lawsuit, but the Herald seems to have their lead wrong, as I can find no reference anywhere else to a separate suit by Brennan.

Florida's $2 million centralized voter database, which is supposed to help weed out felons and people who have died, may have a serious flaw, a New York legal group that is suing the state said Tuesday.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law says this new database may not be including the names of thousands of people who had their voting rights restored by the state of Florida during a nearly 40-year period. If the information is true, it would raise serious questions as to the accuracy of a new list of nearly 48,000 registered voters that the state says are potential felons who are ineligible to vote.

The database, developed in the wake of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, draws on various sources of information to come up with a list that can be given to county election supervisors so that ineligible voters can be purged from local voting rolls. Included in the database are arrest records, clemency records, death records and records of duplicate voter registrations.

Convicted felons released from prison are barred from voting in Florida unless their voting rights are restored by the state, a process handled by the Office of Executive Clemency.

The Brennan Center, which has filed a federal lawsuit to overturn Florida's voting ban for felons, says it requested records from both the state Division of Elections and the state Office of Executive Clemency and discovered ''massive discrepancies'' between the two offices.

Center lawyers said the documents revealed that the clemency office reported restoring voting rights to 171,408 people during a nearly 36-year period, while the Division of Elections said it only had records showing that 145,823 people had their rights restored at the time in question, between 1964 and 2000.

Jessie Allen, associate counsel for the Brennan Center, acknowledged that many of the people who had their rights restored during this period may have never chosen to register to vote or may have moved to another state.

POSSIBLE ERRORS

But it's possible that the new felon list developed by the Division of Elections may list some people as ineligible when they in fact had their rights restored, she said.

'We're not just wringing our hands, saying, `It's inaccurate,' '' Allen said in a phone interview from her New York City offices. ``The state should explain this. We don't know what the explanation is.''

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees the Division of Elections, called the Brennan Center's review ''flawed'' and said that the organization has never shared any of its questions with state officials.

''They have come up with inappropriate conclusions,'' spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.

Marielba Torres, assistant general counsel for the Division of Elections, also insisted that the report was ''not credible'' and suggested that the Brennan Center relied on totals that may have included ''cases handled'' by the clemency office, not a listing of people who had actually their voting rights restored.

She also suggested that the organization may have counted people who did not have a full restoration of voting rights.

But Allen said that her organization went through all the totals provided by the Office of Executive Clemency -- and only added those listed as full pardons, restoration of all civil rights or restoration of voting rights by the Office of Executive Clemency. For example, her group did not count those who were listed as having their right to own a gun restored.

''It's not that we added wrong,'' Allen said.

So, add this to the growing list of problems with the 2004 edition of the Florida felon purge list.

County Supervisors of election are meeting in Key West to discuss the list and other matters related to this year’s elections.

The question will reverberate today in a Tallahassee courtroom and in the halls of a Key West resort, where the annual meeting of county elections supervisors is buzzing about a shake-up at the state Division of Elections.

Will Florida repeat the worst mistakes of the presidential election of 2000?

Polls suggest the electorate could be as evenly split Nov. 2 as it was four years ago when George W. Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes.

And a study released Tuesday by a New York-based advocacy center suggests that Florida again is in danger of relying on questionable data to purge thousands of alleged felons from the voting rolls.

"These people were granted clemency, they had their civil rights restored, and they should not be on that felon purge list," said Scott Schell, a spokesman for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
......

Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles, the incoming president of the state supervisors' association, said that checking the felon list against the clemency list is one of the first things supervisors do in their research.

He and other supervisors pointed out that the state's list is merely a starting point and stressed that they will do their own investigations before beginning the process of removing anyone from the voter rolls.

But it's impossible for most people or media groups to independently verify, Schell said, because the Department of State refuses to allow unfettered access to the felons list.

In an April memo to all 67 county elections supervisors, Division of Elections Director Ed Kast said the felon list is part of the voter rolls and falls under the restrictions of a 2001 election reform law that allows only political parties, officeholders and state agencies to obtain copies.

The public can only view the rolls and is not allowed to copy the list or take notes.

The decision sparked a lawsuit by Cable News Network. Attorneys for CNN and several Florida news organizations will appear before Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Clark today to argue, among other things, that the law restricting access to the list is unconstitutional because it was passed as part of a broad election reform package and not as a separate exemption to the Florida Constitution's broad open-government provisions.
......

Denying the public records request may be Kast's last official act. The 10-year veteran of the division submitted a three-sentence resignation letter to Secretary of State Glenda Hood on Monday.
......

Several elections chiefs at the Key West convention said they were surprised by Kast's sudden resignation.

Leon County Supervisor Ion Sancho said he thinks Kast grew weary of the controversy surrounding the felon list.

"It just saddened us, right in the middle of a critical juncture of our election process, our director leaves.... The speculation here is that this has put so much pressure on Mr. Kast that continuing on probably wasn't that much fun," Sancho said.
......

Most of the state's elections supervisors are meeting in Key West under the watchful eye of representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the liberal People for the American Way Foundation and officials of the state Republican and Democratic parties.

The elections chiefs plan to discuss the felon issue with state officials this afternoon..

Multiple barriers to voting. Key posts staffed by extreme partisans. Confusion surrounding the felon list. Sounds like 2000 all over again. But don’t worry: there wont be any recount headaches this time, because with new paperless touchscreen voting machines, many counties will have nothing to recount: (from the same Palm Beach Post article):

Several elections chiefs said they were surprised by Kast's sudden resignation. But under Florida's decentralized elections system, they noted that county supervisors largely run elections and rely on the Division of Elections for guidance and legal opinions.

"The division gives us interpretations of the law if we ask for it," said Sarasota County Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent. "They don't tell us how to run our individual offices."

Still, those interpretations can be significant.

It was a Kast letter, for instance, that told counties that use paperless touch-screen voting systems that they should not attempt to make printouts of electronic ballots to conduct manual recounts in close elections.

That led to state and federal lawsuits by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach. Both suits were dismissed, but Wexler is appealing the decisions.

Update - see the state’s response to the CNN lawsuit here. (Link via Florida Politics)
Update: this from an alert reader in NY:

From your post:

The Herald article is reporting on some new discrepancies found in lists of Florida felons who have had their civil rights restored. The Brennan Center for Justice may be joining the CNN lawsuit, but the Herald seems to have their lead wrong, as I can find no reference anywhere else to a separate suit by Brennan.

Could be this: In 2000, the Brennan Center filed a class-action lawsuit regarding Florida's disfranchisement of former felons.

The lawsuit is Johnson v. Bush.
http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/dem_vr_lit_johnson.html

The Center, representing some 600,000 Florida citizens in a class action suit, is challenging the constitutionality of Florida's permanent disenfranchisement of ex-felons. Joined by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Morrison & Foerster, and Florida civil rights attorney James Green, the plaintiffs' counsel argued that, because of its discriminatory intent and effect, Florida's voting ban violated both the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Center appealed a summary judgment ruling in favor of the state, and a hearing took place before the 11th Circuit in April 2003.

On December 19, 2003, the 11th Circuit reversed the summary judgment ruling in a decision available here.

The case is featured in a new documentary, "Trouble in Paradise."

The press release regarding the 11th Circuit's judgment is here:

http://www.brennancenter.org/presscenter/releases_2003/pressrelease_2003_1219.html

monica_nyc

So many lawsuits... my head is just spinning. Yes, this must be the case that The Herald refers to - it’s been remanded to the lower court for trial, so the phrase “a New York legal group that is suing the state” is accurate, but it sure would have been nice if The Herald had made clear exactly which lawsuit it was referring to. Thanks Monica!