BlogWood: MT Archives

Felonious Junk: audit shows glimpse of problems

A new audit just released by the state gently criticizes the methods used to create the hugely flawed 2004 felon purge list, but, according to news reports, does not go so far as to suggest that any of the mistakes were intentional.

Since the state has been extremely savvy and blatantly partisan by including mostly Democratic voters on utterly inept in its attempts to create and manage a list of felons who are ineligible to vote, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has concluded that the best way for the GOP to retain power remedy is to design an even bigger list, ‘cause, um, the other list was someone else’s job well done fault.

Hood did not promise to produce a more accurate list, but did say that she hopes to eliminate controversies. Translated, that means that she and Jeb! have figured out a way to keep the new list super secret, thus avoiding those pesky controversies.

Oh, and there’s no reason to think that this audit may be flawed in any way whatsoever just because the auditor works for Glenda Hood.

Responding to a critical audit, Secretary of State Glenda Hood said Monday she will create a bureau to develop a statewide voter registration list in hopes of eliminating controversies that have plagued recent elections.

The new list will be designed to prevent anyone from voting in more than one place, and to remove names of dead people or felons who have not had their rights restored.

Hood said the development of that list will become the priority of the Bureau of Registration Services, which will handle all measures relating to the new Help America Vote Act approved by Congress after the 2000 election.

The changes were announced after a 50-page audit criticizing the way the Division of Elections managed a $2.2-million contract with Accenture, hired in 2001 to create a statewide voter registration list.

That list contained the names of felons who would be prevented from voting unless their civil rights had been restored. County election officials were to consult the list to prevent that from happening.

But the list was scrapped before the 2004 elections after revelations that it mistakenly excluded Hispanic felons.

The felons list has been a hot-button issue since the 2000 presidential election, when some voters discovered at polling sites that they had been erroneously stricken from the rolls. The loudest complaints came from Democrats, who claimed it was mostly their supporters who were prevented from voting.

The state then turned to Accenture, a huge consulting and technology firm, to create a list that election supervisors were to use this year to screen felons whose voting rights had not been restored.

But the list proved inaccurate.

"No person was denied their right to vote in the 2004 election," Hood noted. "That's very important."

Well, to be a little more accurate, after the state was forced to drop the felon purge list, no one was wrongly disenfranchised based on the list. Probably. See, Ms. Hood simply dropped the mandatory requirement that individual county elections chiefs use the list to purge their rolls. Some may have quietly kept using the list. But I digress.

The 50-page audit, done by Hood's own inspector general, Kirby J. Mole, said inadequate project management within the state elections division created most of the problems.

"There was no evidence detected to substantiate that the division intended for such disparities to occur," Mole said.

In addition to poor management, elections officials failed to properly notify the NAACP when they made changes in the way the 2004 list was being developed, a violation of a court settlement reached after the NAACP filed suit in 2001.

The elections division also failed to notify the U.S. Department of Justice, which must approve any change in election procedures.

Asked who was responsible for the failure, Hood said the division was directed by Clay Roberts, who ran the office for Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris.

They failed to comply with court orders and federal law. No biggie - it’s someone else fault...

It was Roberts who ordered that arrest data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement not be used if the race and gender of a felon did not match exactly the race and gender listed on voting records. The FDLE does not list Hispanic as a race, so the names of Hispanic felons weren't included in the list.

Both Hood and Roberts, who now works for Attorney General Charlie Crist, insist that the 2002 decision was made to ensure the list was drawn as narrowly as possible to avoid including someone on the list who didn't belong on it.

Yeah, like someone who might be likely to vote for Jeb!’s brother. I think they let a bit of truth slip through there. Smelly truth.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way Foundation, who was co-counsel in a lawsuit challenging an earlier 2000 purge list, said: ``This smells to high heaven. It strains credulity to think that Hispanics were somehow left off the list, while African Americans remained on the list.''

Hispanics in Florida register Republican more often than Democratic. By contrast, more than 90 percent of the nearly one million black voters in Florida are Democrats.

Finally, I touched on this briefly already, but what’s with the constant disregard for the rule of law, and why aren’t any of these points in the headlines? Lies, lost documents, ignoring federal civil rights regulations...

OTHER CONCLUSIONS

Other key audit findings:

The department relied on flawed data from the Office of Executive Clemency when drawing up the felons list. For example, the office did not initially turn over the names of more than 5,000 felons whose civil rights were restored before 1977 because the office did not have birth dates for those people. In June, when asked about this possible flaw, state officials denied that it was a problem.

The department did not ensure that some changes to the central voter database were approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, which must sign off on any new procedures that affect voting rights of minorities.

The department did not always comply with a legal agreement it reached in 2002 with the NAACP over how to use the central voter database and the felons list.

The department failed to keep a close watch over the project and Accenture. The audit notes that the inspector general could not find all the required documentation for the project.