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Purging the purge list

With the recent public release of the 2004 Florida voter purge list, the media and other organizations have been searching for errors by crunching numbers and checking names at a frantic pace.

On Friday, the first day after a court forced the state to make the list public, The Miami Herald reported that 2,100 former felons who were on the list should not have been included, since they had their civil rights restored by the Governor.

The state responded by citing a bureaucratic rule that calls for a person in these circumstances to reregister if they had mistakenly registered to vote before their right to vote had been officially restored. In other words, the state was saying that 1,600 of these 2,100 had registered too early and therefore must do it again.

The state wanted each county to remove these eligible voters from the rolls and then ask them to come down and sign up again. Oh, and the vast majority of people in this little subset of the list are registered Democrats. A disproportionately large percentage of them are black.

Well, now the state is backing down, having been pressured by the NAACP, ACLU, and other civic minded groups. Jeb!’s Secretary of State has agreed to unpurge some of these eligible voters, but there is massive confusion as to how many names are coming off the list and the criteria being used.

After lots of research and having perused articles in many of the state’s largest newspapers, I have definitively concluded that somewhere between 300 and 2,500 names are being purged from the purge list.

State Clears 2,500 Names Off Felon List: From The Tampa Tribune

Stung by public disclosures that its own record-keeping system could block eligible voters from the polls this fall, the state Elections Division agreed Wednesday to wipe nearly 2,500 Floridians from its list of probable felons ineligible to cast ballots.

The nearly 2,500 were possible felons flagged by state analysts for registering to vote before their voting rights were restored. However, the state's method of identifying them was flawed, and voting rights advocates threatened to sue because they questioned whether the voters should have been singled out in the first place.

Hundreds taken off felons list (SP Times)

The number of voters affected by the policy change is not clear.

Several newspaper analyses of the potential felons list found as many as 2,000 people on the list who had been granted clemency, meaning their rights were restored.

However, the St. Petersburg Times found as many as 1,000 names on the statewide potential felons list who completed their sentence and improperly registered to vote before they received clemency. State officials estimated the number to be around 300.

Herald.com | 07/07/2004 | State: 1,600 ex-felons eligible to vote

The Florida Division of Elections did an about-face Wednesday, acknowledging that 1,600 former felons whose voting rights had been restored should be removed from its list of potentially ineligible voters.

The Herald reported last week that the 1,600 were among more than 2,100 felons who remained on the state's list even though they had regained the right to vote.

State officials initially insisted they were simply following Florida law by including the 1,647, each of whom had registered to vote before their civil rights had been restored. County elections supervisors were directed to contact each voter and have them reregister before the November election -- or face removal from the voting rolls.

Yet the Department of State -- whose secretary, Glenda Hood, reports to Gov. Jeb Bush -- backtracked on the issue.
......

The decision drew praise from civil rights groups, who argued that qualified voters could have been kicked off the rolls because of administrative errors and bureaucratic bungling.

Advocates with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Justice Institute, who threatened to sue unless the state switched course, also said that forcing voters to reregister served no legitimate purpose and potentially violated the law.

''I think it was a needless impediment to the right to vote in Florida,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida.
......

Simon cautioned that the state list of 47,000 possible felons registered to vote must still be scrutinized for mistaken identities and other irregularities before elections supervisors begin removing people from the rolls.

Another 500 voters who have won clemency remain on the list, for instance.

So, is the state going to issue an updated list? Can we just do the math to figure out how many names were removed? When will this happen? Will there be time to straighten this whole mess out before the election? What about other list issues and election problems like lawsuits over touch screen voting recounts? Stay tuned!