News Clips(news clips have not been kept updated - check archives) Some
Broward probationers mistakenly told they couldn't vote Parties
unveil new strategy to lock up the election Felon Purges Are Spreading Like CancerFlorida's felon purge illegally removed
thousands of voters - mostly black - from the voter rolls. This was
largely because of "fuzzy" programming - such as an 80% match of
the letters in the last name. But this fraud-prone practice was recently
adopted by state legislatures in CO, GA, IN, KS, MT, SD, TX, VA, and WA.
Moreover, 16 other states are considering such bills. Meanwhile in
Congress, "Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) has introduced a bill in
which certain conditions in any state would trigger mandatory voter list
purges." This is exactly the WRONG approach, as reporter Greg Palast
details in this important article. Tell your Senators: outlaw felon
purges! ... There was a protest on Inauguration day in our small town. Our family went and participated. It was the largest protest in this town since the Viet Nam War. I thought - "Wow, we're not alone!" Then I glanced at some of the major on-line newspapers, but there was very little coverage of the protests from other towns or cities. I couldn't help but wonder why this was being covered up by the media. Why can't the media just report the news? How can the governed make any decisions if they don't get the real news? I started reading the British & Canadian news reports - at least I knew what was really going on in America. The felon voter purge in Florida was reported in the British news months before the American newspapers decided it was newsworthy... more Voting ExCons.com - an Oregon website for all felons who have lost their voting rights
Our purpose is to educate and
empower the growing number of formerly incarcerated Americans to use
their votes to lobby for positive social and political change
– and to stop the mass disenfranchisement of American citizens
based solely on a felony conviction history.
We believe that ex-felons, voting responsibly and in a
bloc, can make major changes in this country’s political and
economic future.
Please visit our web site and tell us what you think.
We welcome your suggestions for additional links – and ideas
-- to make our web site better.
Thanks,
Judy W. Talley, Editor VotingExCons.com
Purging system gets a (no) vote
By HARRIET M. LUDWIG, Gainesville Sun Sunday,
June 10, 2001
Harriet M. Ludwig is a retired journalist who lives in
Gainesville.
Slowly, the word is seeping out. It was more than the wrong kind of voting machines that caused the Election 2000 debacle.
The headline on a report by the Los Angeles Times, printed (May
21) in The Gainesville Sun, says "Florida voter rolls purge
was inaccurate."
Those conclusions are documented in detail in a master's degree
project done by Gainesville resident Deb Cupples, who graduated
in political science at the University of Florida last month.
Her study backs the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's preliminary
report (March 9, 2000).
It states that "key state officials (no names) made
decisions before and during the election that tipped it to
George W. Bush." Their final report is due this month.
The studies have become politically explosive because the
decisions and inaccuracies targeted large numbers of black
non-felons and ex-felons of all races whose rights had been
restored-and the majority would likely have voted Democrat.
Sociologists Christopher Uggen (University of Minnesota) and
Jeff Manza (Northwestern University) confirmed this in studies
of ex-felon voting patterns based on class, income, race and
other factors.
Minorities and poor people who can't afford private attorneys
have historically voted Democrat.
A class-action lawsuit against Florida, filed by the Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University Law College, alleges
that more than 500,000 ex-felons are denied the vote in Florida.
One in four of them are black.
All but 14 states automatically restore voting rights when a
felon's sentence is completed, but Florida has a cumbersome
clemency process requiring a hearing before the governor.
The ACLU of Florida is suing the Department of Corrections for
not informing prison inmates of the process before they return
to citizen life. The national ACLU labels Election 2000 "a
threat to democracy."
An NAACP lawsuit charges the state with violating the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 and asks an order of surveillance to prevent
discrimination in future elections in Florida.
Cupples traces the history of Florida voter purges from 1998
legislation passed in response to voter fraud in the Miami
mayoral election of 1997. That program (Florida statute 98) is
aimed to cleanse Florida's central voter file of voters who had
become ineligible by death, moving from the state, or were
ex-felons whose voting rights had not been restored.
The state Division of Elections was to conduct the purge with
help from county election supervisors and a private firm.
Florida is the only state to require the use of a private firm.
The multi-year contract with DataBase Technologies, Inc., now
part of Atlanta-based ChoicePoint Inc., cost Florida taxpayers
$4 million. It was awarded to DBT by then under-Secretary of
State Sandra Mortham.
DBT was told to cross-check the 8.6 million names of Florida's
registered voters with law enforcement and other records. Over
the next two years, DBT compiled a database to identify-and
often misidentify-about 100,000 felons and dead people still on
the voter rolls.
At an early 2001 hearing in Miami, DBT spokesman George Bruder
told the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that Florida officials
"cast too wide a net" to ensure accuracy in the voter
check. He said state officials were warned, but chose to
stick with that format.
Bruder also talked of "false positives," where DBT
lists matched felons and non-felons who had similar but not
identical names.
Examples of "false positives" included a Hillsborough
County judge and the Madison County elections supervisor. Both
were on a possible-felon list, but neither were felons.
An example of wrong identification is Patricia Lassiter, a
former Gainesville resident who now lives in Atlanta. During a
trip to Tampa, she learned that she had been purged as a felon,
though she has no such conviction.
Fortunately, she knew poll workers there who allowed her to
vote, but many were not so lucky.
DBT got its Election 2000 instructions from DOE, which reported
to Secretary of State Katherine Harris. One DBT list included
12,000 state residents with felony convictions in Texas,
Illinois, Ohio and Florida-although the first three states
restore voting rights on completion of sentences.
Also, a South Florida Court of Appeals ruled in 1998 that
ex-felons whose rights were restored in other states could vote
in Florida without going through the clemency process (Schlenther
vs. Florida Department of State.)
Alachua County Elections Supervisor Beverly Hill says the Bureau
of Clemency instructed elections offices not to register
ex-felons unless they had written proof of restoration of
rights. Such proof is not usually issued in states with
automatic restoration.
Cupples' research shows that for more than two years, citizens
were wrongly placed on purge lists. Statistics for less than 10
percent of Florida counties showed more than 3,790 errors before
election 1998 and more than 11,000 errors before election 2000.
She lists likely causes of error as poor data quality, DOE's
choice of purging method, and the legally questionable directive
from the Office of Executive Clemency regarding ex-felons with
restored voting rights.
Statistics show in 2001 that Florida's purge program is still
going strong. A move to pass laws for automatic restoration of
ex-felons' voting rights failed in the recent Legislature.
Hillsborough County's elections supervisor said the state sent
out a "fatally" flawed list earlier in 2000 and a
"fairly inaccurate" one in June 2000. Palm Beach
County and Treasure Coast reported a combined 657 errors,
including "people erroneously identified as muggers,
burglars and car thieves." Leon County's supervisor said
only 34 of 690 voters targeted for removal proved to be felons.
The Associated Press reported that of the 58,000 voters targeted
for purging, about 12,000 were listed as felons, though many had
been convicted only of misdemeanors.
In Hillsborough County, of the 551 voters who appealed their
alleged ineligibility to vote, 245 succeeded, a more than 40
percent error rate.
Of the 7,837 appeals filed with the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement, 3,729 were mistakes resolved in the voter's favor.
Katherine Harris, Go Away!A BuzzFlash News Analysis KATHERINE HARRIS SAYS PALAST 'TWISTED AND MANIACAL' - in July Harper's
Harper's Magazine
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Have I upset Kate? Darn. The Florida Secretary of State
has sent me a heartfelt billet-doux in time for my birthday. Twisted and
maniacal? I won't deny it. Most important, she doesn't say I was wrong:
her office sent out lists of 57,700 voters - most of them black, almost
all of them innocent, to remove from the voter rolls. Harris' letter,
despite its berserker tone, is in fact an astonishing confession. Read it
all in this month's Harper's Magazine, along with my reply.
Ms Harris begins: ”Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts.” Katherine Harris does not deny the central allegations of my Annotation: that her office ordered 57,700 Florida citizens be removed from the voter rolls, despite the knowledge that many, if not most, of these citizens were innocent of all crimes. Rather, she delegates the blame: state law forced her to hire a private firm that compiled this racially corrosive hit list. The Florida secretary of state may cite the law to the fourth decimal, but her interpretation of it-that her office was to provide county officials a list of "potentially ineligible voters"-is chilling. The law required that Harris's office provide a list "identifying" voters who had been convicted of a felony and that it contract with a private entity only to "meet its obligations" under the requirement. Maybe by "potentially" ineligible voters she means thousands like Thomas Cooper, whom her office lists as having been convicted of a felony in the year 2007. The documents amusingly labeled "Secret"-thank you, Ms. Harris; as a reporter I am well versed in the Sunshine Laws-indicate that payment to her contractor depended specifically on "manual verification using telephone calls." Despite numerous requests from Harper's Magazine and the BBC, Harris has never explained why the private firm was paid millions for this work that was not done. Harris's apocryphal claim that county officials asked to take over this expensive work counters both the correspondence in her files and my own conversations with the county election supervisors. Even if she wrongly took away the rights of innocent voters, Harris contends, mistakes on the voter rolls favored Al Gore. This odd defense is founded on her claim that, according to the Palm Beach Post, "thousands of felons voted." But the Post's conclusions were based on data used by Harris, with even sloppier methods of verification than hers. Because Harris's list was hopelessly flawed, some counties refused to remove voters from their rolls; therefore, thousands of her "ex-felons" did vote. After the 2000 election, Florida's attorney general promised to arrest any ineligible voter who had gone to the polls, a criminal offense in Florida. So far, the Harris and Post lists have produced, he says, fewer than half a dozen cases, out of thousands accused. The Annotation's most damning accusation, from the view of civil rights lawyers, is that the state purged ex-convicts who had their right to vote restored by other states. Rather than deny the charge, Harris claims that she was required to do so by a letter from Governor Jeb Bush's Office of Executive Clemency. Oops! Harris has just blown Jeb's alibi. His office, as I mention in the Annotation, assured me that no such letter exists. Indeed, Bush's office produced a letter dated February 23, 2001, with a position opposite Harris's. Regardless of where Harris seeks to shift the blame, her office clearly did wrong. The NAACP has filed suit over the voter purges uncovered by our BBC and Guardian reports. NAACP v Harris goes to trial in August. Katherine, if you've got an alibi for operating a Jim Crow election operation, tell it to the judge. Katherine Harris, cochairwoman of Florida's George W. Bush for President campaign and now candidate for Congress, accuses this London reporter of "partisanship." To that, one hardly knows how to respond. --- Katherine Harris Florida Secretary of State Tallahassee, Fla. A Florida Makeover Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts. Palast erroneously claims that my predecessor and I "ordered 57,700 'ex-felons,' who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls," when in fact the Florida legislature, through Florida Statute Section 98.0975, mandated that we use a private firm to provide to Florida's 67 county supervisors of elections a list identifying potentially ineligible voters whose names remained on the voter-registration rolls. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect. Revealingly, Palast provides examples of persons whose names allegedly appeared on the list in error without mentioning whether these persons had been permitted, or even had attempted, to vote in the election. He claims that "Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all" but neglects to mention that, according to a study conducted by the Palm Beach Post, "[t]housands of felons voted in the presidential election . . . [who] almost certainly influenced the . . . election" in favor of former vice president Al Gore. According to the Post, this estimated number of illegal voters far outnumbered the persons who allegedly could not vote because they were erroneously removed from the voter rolls. Showing the laughable depths to which he will stoop, Palast ominously notes that Florida's contract with DBT Online, a private company, was "marked 'Secret' and 'Confidential,'" neglecting to mention that 1) DBT, not the Department of State, requested this notation in an effort to prevent other companies from copying and selling the computer software used to generate the list, and 2) Florida's expansive public-records law would have prohibited us from making that contract "secret" even if we had tried to do so. Further, Palast contends that, "with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon" without noting that we provided this "blessing" at the behest of Florida's county supervisors of elections, who wished to contact the persons on the list themselves, pursuant to their statutory responsibility. Palast even misrepresents two rulings of the Florida District Courts of Appeal as orders of the Florida Supreme Court, while ranting that these decisions prohibited Florida from removing any names of felons from the voting rolls whose civil rights had been restored automatically in another state. Before the 2000 election, the Department of State asked Florida's Office of Executive Clemency, which answered to Governor Jeb Bush and an executive cabinet that included Democratic attorney general Bob Butterworth and Democratic U.S. senator Bill Nelson, for its opinion on this matter. The Office of Executive Clemency issued a letter advising us that felons who had not received an order of clemency from another state must apply to have their civil rights restored in Florida before being eligible to vote. Florida's difficult experience in Election 2000 exposed flaws in the elections process that had festered across America for decades, since the political will to address these flaws had never existed. I am proud to have helped Florida become the nationally acclaimed leader in election reform since that time. Last year, the Florida legislature passed virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act. This legislation placed the burden on the state to prove a person's ineligibility to vote before removing that person from the rolls, correcting the problem in the law that led to any erroneous removal of eligible voters before the 2000 election. In Florida we have moved aggressively to prevent such concerns from arising ever again. I regret that Greg Palast's political agenda does not permit him to acknowledge this simple fact. http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=167&row=0 .....jkeel, 6/26/02 Response to Kathryn Harris's letter:You are so wrong......
I am one of the names who was taken off the rolls in 2000. Thank you
Cruella. My Grandfather,Father,3 Uncles and Brother fought in this
nations wars and shed blood on the battlefields of this country's
wars. I believe in justice Ms. Harris, and I pray that someday you
are held accountable for what you did to democracy and to me.
.... zeek, 6/27/02 THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME
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