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-- Florida Elections: Deja Freakin' Vu All Over Again!
Florida Elections: Deja Freakin' Vu All Over Again!
More voter purgin', comin' up:
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| Jun 7, 2004 Delays, Purge Hit Voter Rolls By WILLIAM MARCH [email protected] TAMPA - For the second straight presidential election, Florida's law against former felons voting, a law grounded in Old South racism, may prevent thousands of people from voting. Some of those people may be legally entitled to vote. Others won't be able to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles of the state's clemency process to get their rights restored in time for the election. But the state government is concentrating on removing as many former felons from voting rolls as possible, even though critics charge that it risks disenfranchising some who are legally entitled to vote. Meanwhile, those critics charge, the state is dragging its feet on restoring those wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000. Florida is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons from voting unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of having their rights restored. That law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000 presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly thousands of voters - no one knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls in 2000, some wrongly, because of errors in a state ``purge list'' of former felons. Today, as the 2004 election nears: * More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking. * Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls. * A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional and affects up to 600,000 people. Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again. Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000. Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day. The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic. In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists. Asked why a new purge list is going out less than six months before the election, Secretary of State Glenda Hood said it's part of establishing a statewide voter list, as required by the state's 2001 election reform law. The law was passed in the wake of the disputed presidential vote. ``The legislation mandated that as soon as this process [of identifying improperly registered names] was complete, the information be sent out,'' said Hood, a Republican and an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush. But Hood acknowledged ``there is no particular time line'' in the law for sending purge lists to county elections supervisors. Hood's staff didn't follow through on a promise to have a staff attorney call a reporter to discuss precisely what part of the new law requires that the list go out now. When news of the new purge list broke about three weeks ago, it drew a chorus of anger from civil rights advocates who had sued the state over the 2000 election problems. ``Frankly, the state should first fix the problems with people who were erroneously thrown off in 2000 before they start on another purge,'' said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way Foundation, a liberal-oriented advocacy group. State officials are seeking to keep the new purge list secret, but CNN is suing to get a copy. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, and several news organizations including The Tampa Tribune plan to join the lawsuit. They Were Purged Derek Graham, Willie Johnson and Jeffrey Key, who are black and of Tampa, were three of the thousands of people legally removed from the voter rolls in 2000. They have past felony records and hadn't had their rights restored. But all three also say they had been registered, and voting, for years before being turned away in 2000. ``When they release you, they don't tell you that you have to go through a process to receive those rights back,'' said Key, 40, a Progress Village homeowner with two grown children, one in college. Key served four years in the 1980s for armed robbery and got a job on work release with the same printing company where he is now a supervisor. After being turned away from the polls in 2000, it took him 2 1/2 years to get his rights restored. Johnson, 69, a retired truck driver, served a short sentence in the 1950s for breaking and entering, but had been voting since 1962. He has sent an application to Tallahassee but doesn't expect to be able to vote this year. ``If I did wrong, it's my part,'' he said. ``But I did my time. I haven't been in trouble since; I've been working ever since.'' Graham, 38, who operates a street sweeper for the city of Tampa, remembers voting for the Community Investment Tax in 1996. It has been 17 years since the drug possession charge landed him an eight-month sentence. He applied 10 months ago to have his rights restored. He hasn't heard back. Graham and Johnson are among 43,847 Floridians waiting to have their rights restored as of June 30, 2003. That number has gone up from 6,437 in June 2001. As part of the settlement of litigation prompted by the 2000 election, the state sent restoration applications to thousands of former felons, which swamped the Executive Clemency Office staff. Spokeswoman Jane Tillman said the office hoped the number would decline this year, but that depended on the Legislature approving 20 new positions for investigators. It didn't. The applicants may have a long wait. David Scott Stiles of Dover, 34, a truck driver, registered to vote - legally, he thought - after getting out of prison for motorcycle theft in 1998. In 2000, he was purged. Stiles applied for rights restoration in September 2002 but was just told, nearly two years later, that his case won't be acted on in time for him to vote this year. ``I'm a felon, I screwed up, but I paid for what I did,'' he said. ``Now it's time for the state to do what they're supposed to do.'' One reason these voters didn't know they weren't legally entitled to vote is that the state of Florida didn't produce felon purge lists before 1999. The law was enforced on a haphazard basis, as county clerks of court sent criminal records to local election supervisors. The Legislature required state officials to begin aggressively enforcing the law after a corrupt city election in Miami in 1997, contaminated mainly by fraudulent absentee ballots. Investigations also found former felons voting in that race. In 2000, the purge list attempted to capture the names missed over the years. It also captured the names of at least 2,120 former felons who moved to Florida after having their rights restored in other states. Under a 1998 court decision, the restoration should have applied in Florida. But the names were removed anyway, along with some people whose rights had been restored in Florida, and thousands like Graham, Johnson, Key and Stiles, who had never had their rights restored because they didn't know they needed to. Something Really Wonderful Florida's felon disenfranchisement law dates from 1868, when the state produced a new constitution to win readmission to the Union after the Civil War. According to Florida historian Jerrell Shofner, it was added by a political faction that sought the support of former Confederates. A member of that faction later boasted that the new state constitution prevented the state from coming under the influence of black people, Shofner said. The Brennan Center for Justice, a legal advocacy group associated with New York University Law School, is suing to have the provision declared unconstitutional. A trial court judge in Miami dismissed the lawsuit, but it was reinstated in a split decision by a three- judge appeals court panel in December. The state has asked for review by the full court. Another post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter criteria in producing its felon purge lists. The lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In 2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names as possible, even knowing it would result in ``false positives'' - people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former counsel of the Division of Elections. They relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches before removing the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to complete the task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent letters to everyone on their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or couldn't provide proof they weren't felons. That resulted in many people being wrongly removed; no one knows how many. Under the litigation settlement, each county is supposed to report completion of its efforts to find and re-register those wrongly removed. Only 33 of the 67 counties have done so. Hillsborough Election Supervisor Buddy Johnson said 533 people were incorrectly listed as ineligible former felons on Hillsborough's rolls and said those purged have been re-registered. Many election officials, including Kurt Browning in Pasco County, don't see the need for disenfranchising former felons to begin with. ``If they're going to be released, we want them to be assimilated back into society,'' said Browning, Pasco's elections supervisor. ``If they get a job, pay taxes, why shouldn't they have the right to vote?'' Election Supervisors Concerned Hood said the statewide voter list required by the 2001 reform law was finished on time, in May 2002. But settling the NAACP lawsuit and devising the new matching criteria delayed production of the felon purge list until now, she said. She said the names are considered ``potential matches,'' which the supervisor must check for accuracy. ``A supervisor is going to make absolutely certain that the name should be removed,'' and won't ``unless they have absolute proof,'' she said. That means this year's process will be different from 2000, said State Department spokeswoman Jenny Nash, because the burden of proof is on the supervisor to make sure the voter is a felon, not on the voter to prove innocence. But the supervisors themselves aren't so sure. Deciding whether a voter has a criminal record can be a tricky investigative task, involving names, Social Security numbers and birth dates that are similar but don't quite match, and checks of state or nationwide criminal records. ``I'm trying to figure out by what authority, why we have to investigate this list of people,'' Browning said. ``It's not my job. I'm not an investigator. I don't know what I'm doing with this stuff.'' Other supervisors, including Ion Sancho of Leon County, have said they don't have the staff or money for investigations or the mailings or advertisements intended to notify affected voters. According to instructions published on the State Department Web site, if a voter fails to respond to a letter within 30 days, the supervisor is required to remove the name from the list. Browning said that appears to leave the burden of proof on the voter, just as in 2000. ``I'm trying to figure out what's different,'' he said. ``If I got a letter saying you might be a felon, I'm not going to let that sit,'' Browning said. But some may not respond because of address changes, misunderstanding or other errors. ``For whatever reason, the assumption is that if they don't respond, maybe they are a felon,'' he said. Asked whether supervisors are free to ignore the lists, Hood responded, ``I think the supervisors are going to be very cautious that they don't eliminate any voter from the list if they don't have absolute proof.'' Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761. This story can be found at: http://news.tbo.com/news/MGB7TQUZ5VD.html |
Disagree. Felons don't need to vote. The penalties preventing voting for convicted felons were lawfully enacted by the state legislatures and cannot be contested unless by Supreme Court Review. Some jail bird would have to sue for such review and show a discriminatory practice based on Constitutional law.
[[[smoke]]]
I must disagree with you here. Although this issue is entirely left up to the states (only 7 have this as a law), I fail to see how a felony should entitle the state to strip you of a Constitutional right to vote for your political leaders. Indeed, this may be the reason why there are only 7 states that still enact such a law, but I could very well be wrong.
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I must disagree with you here. Although this issue is entirely left up to the states (only 7 have this as a law), I fail to see how a felony should entitle the state to strip you of a Constitutional right to vote for your political leaders. Indeed, this may be the reason why there are only 7 states that still enact such a law, but I could very well be wrong. |
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| Originally posted by Shakka Probably by the rationale that a convicted felon has deprived others of their rights, so in turn they have forfeited some rights of their own. Do you want convicted felons influencing voting elections? It's another one of those nasty grey areas, I suppose. I have mixed feelings on this subject. I, in turn, fail to see how a felony should reinforce rights that have already been taken for granted. |
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| Originally posted by ResonantDrag what about those who have deprived others of their rights, but do to financial well-being have had either convictions overturned or have found themselves back on the voter list? As a registered republican, would i have a better chance for readmission than a registered democrat or independent? These laws need to be better defined so that there is a stated criteria that a felon would need to meet before applications can be turned in. Even if for some reason this is not political pandering, it sure as hell looks to be so. Personally, i don't think convicted felons should be allowed to vote, at least until they have displayed their abandonment of that mentaal. But to purg their right after they have been able to vote out of fear that they may vote against the ruling party should be a considered a greater crime than armed robbery. Thieves of liberty should be added to that "list". |
Update: Florida purge lists dropped due to enormous error
It's nice to see a little justice taken place. Funny how they dropped the list after the judge ruled in the favor of the Press' rights to see the list:
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| Voter list mess shows officials can't be trusted BY JIM DEFEDE Sharon Lettman-Pacheco was driving to her office in Tallahassee Saturday when her cellphone rang with the news that Florida had just scrapped its voter purge list of 47,763 suspected felons. ''Completely?'' she asked. ``You mean we finally wore them down? Wow.'' As a national field director for People for the American Way, Lettman-Pacheco had been fighting the list for months. PFAW, along with the ACLU, the NAACP and other groups, were convinced that many of the names on the list were wrong, and that individuals -- especially blacks -- would be barred from voting this year as they were in 2000. They wanted to verify the list's accuracy, but the state refused to make it public. The groups, along with members of the media and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, then sued the state. On July 1, a Tallahassee judge ordered the list released, but before he did, The Herald obtained a copy, analyzed it, and found more than 2,100 people who were on the purge list despite having their rights restored through clemency. Rather than admit the list was filled with errors, Secretary of State Glenda Hood defended her agency's shoddy work and attacked The Herald. She even had the chutzpah to offer a ''tutorial for all reporters'' last week on the purge list and how it was created, ''in order to prevent factually inaccurate articles such as those reported by The Herald'' from being repeated. Turns out, it was Hood who needed the tutorial. Since The Herald story, more revelations have followed. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported Wednesday that out of the nearly 48,000 names on the list, only 61 were Hispanic. Once again Hood and her boss, Gov. Jeb Bush, stood by the list. Then on Saturday, The New York Times showed why Hispanics, who largely vote Republican, were kept from the list while blacks, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, remained. It turns out, the Department of Corrections database follows the federal standard for race, classifying Hispanics as white, and the election department rolls identify voters by ethnicity. Since the two databases didn't mesh, the identity of Hispanic felons couldn't be verified and were therefore kept off the list. ''Unbelievable,'' Lettman-Pacheco sighed. ``Unbelievable.'' Soon after the Times story broke, Hood, who, at this rate, may soon be as reviled as her predecessor, Katherine Harris, finally caved in and dumped the purge list. ''That's what I call justice,'' Lettman-Pacheco said, applauding the media and groups such as her own for discovering a serious flaw that would have been ignored by the state. ''At the end of the day, though, it is the state that has a responsibility to put in place systems that are fair and equal,'' she said. ``And Florida is simply not doing things fairly. With all the billions of dollars we have allocated in our state government, you would think they would have an information technology division that was objective and knew what it was doing. Or was this intentional? ''This kind of malfeasance of justice clearly has every degree of manipulation written all over it,'' she continued. ``But I'm going to let the public decide how deliberate it was.'' ''I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it was unintentional and unforeseen,'' responded Hood spokeswoman Nicole de Lara. I don't know how de Lara can be so certain. I don't know how she can so casually disregard the possibility there's been an orchestrated attempt to defraud the public and that no one in the state knew about the flaws. As far as I'm concerned, there is no more trust. There are no more second chances. Glenda Hood must resign. She is either amazingly incompetent or the leader of a frightening conspiracy, but either way she should go. Next, the governor should remove himself from matters affecting elections and an agency such as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights should step in and assume direct oversight of the state's election system. Florida is simply a joke that just isn't funny any longer. http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9126937.htm?&1c |
It was just a minor oversite.. why can't you liberals just accept that mistakes happen.
There are too many minor mistakes in this whole mess to be disregarded as completely innocent
Well at least Florida's got those reliable touch-screens, right?:
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| July 14, 2004 Report: Touchscreen Voting Flawed in Fla. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 7:34 a.m. ET FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Touchscreen voting machines didn't perform as well as devices that scanned paper ballots in this year's Florida Democratic presidential primary, raising questions about the state's voting process for the November election, a newspaper reported Sunday. An analysis of just under half of the ballots from the March 9 election shows that votes were not recorded for about one out of every 100 people using the new machines, or a 1.09 percent rate of undervotes, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. An undervote is when a selection cannot be detected on a ballot. That's at least eight times the number of undervotes in the same election on paper ballots marked with pencils and tallied by an optical scanner, which had a 0.12 percent rate of undervotes, the newspaper reported. Undervotes were a problem in the contested 2000 presidential election, in which many Floridians cast their ballots on punch-card machines. After 36 days of legal wrangling and recounts, George W. Bush won Florida, and thus the White House, by just 537 votes. According to a review sponsored by The Associated Press and other news organizations, about 61,190 of 6.1 million total ballots in that election were undervotes, or a 1 percent rate. The state outlawed the punch-card machines after the 2000 election, and the touchscreen machines were billed as a way to avoid a repeat of the problems. Fifteen Florida counties now use touchscreen machines. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top elections official, did not return calls seeking comment Sunday. The Sun-Sentinel analysis of the March 9 election reviewed nearly 350,000 ballots statewide, or about 44 percent of all ballots cast. The ballots analyzed had only one choice, selection of a Democratic Party presidential nominee. The analysis found optical scan machines counted 12 overvotes in the March sample, where voters chose more than one candidate. Overvotes are impossible to cast on touchscreen machines. The media-sponsored review of the 2000 election found 113,820 overvotes, a 1.9 percent rate. The newspaper's findings did not surprise officials of Sequoia Voting Systems and Elections Systems & Software, two companies manufacturing touchscreen machines sold in Florida. ``The most important thing to take from the (Sun-Sentinel) survey findings is that both electronic systems and precinct-based optical scan systems dramatically reduce voter error. ... The Florida numbers demonstrate a substantive improvement over the 2000 presidential election,'' said Alfie Charles, vice president of business development for Sequoia. Meghan McCormick, spokeswoman for ES&S, said some voters simply choose to cast blank ballots. Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County elections supervisor, said it is almost impossible to eliminate undervotes because some people will choose not to vote for any candidate or will make mistakes. ``There is only one perfect voting system,'' LePore said. ``That's the one that doesn't involve humans.'' http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nat...een-Voting.html |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Well at least Florida's got those reliable touch-screens, right?: Boy, thank God they've got those touchscreens now, right? Right? Guys? Hello? |
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| Originally posted by Galapidate I can't wait to see what'll happen in November... |
Jesus, too much to read
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| Originally posted by ResonantDrag passports handy? |
depending on the time of year.. i got mine in two weeks
Update: 2002 voting records "lost"
It just kinda smells a little fishy, doesn't it?
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| July 28, 2004 Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern By ABBY GOODNOUGH IAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election. A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times. "This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition. After the disputed 2000 presidential election eroded confidence in voting machines nationwide, and in South Florida in particular, the state moved quickly to adopt new technology, and in many places touch-screen machines. Voters in 15 Florida counties - covering more than half the state's electorate - will use the machines in November, but reports of mishaps and lost votes in smaller elections over the last two years have cast doubt on their reliability. Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes. After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high. Voting problems plagued Miami-Dade and Broward Counties on that day, when touch-screen machines took much longer than expected to boot up, dozens of polling places opened late and poorly trained poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. A final vote tally - which narrowed the margin first reported between the two candidates by more than 3,000 votes - was delayed for a week. Ms. Reno, who ultimately lost to Mr. McBride by just 4,794 votes statewide, considered requesting a recount at the time but decided against it. Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future. The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May. The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem. In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said. The flaws would not have affected vote counts, he said - only the backup data used for audits after an election. And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway. State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none. Touch-screen machines, officials say, are programmed not to record two votes, and if no vote is recorded, they say, it means the voter did not cast one. But The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, in a recent analysis of the March presidential primary, reported that voters in counties using touch-screen machines were six times as likely to record no vote as were voters in counties using optical-scan machines, which read markings on paper ballots. The A.C.L.U. of Florida and several other voting rights groups have sued to overturn the recount rule, saying it creates unequal treatment of voters. Counties that use optical-scan machines can conduct recounts, though only in extremely close races. Mr. Kaplan says that the system crashes had erased data from other elections besides Ms. Reno's, the most recent being municipal elections in November 2003. Under Florida law, ballot records from elections for state and local office need be kept for only a year. For federal races, the records must be kept for 22 months after an election is certified. It was not immediately clear what the consequences might be of breaching that law. Mr. Kaplan said the backup system was added last December. An August 2002 report from Miami-Dade County auditors to David Leahy, then the county elections supervisor, recommended that all data from touch-screen machines be backed up on CD's or elsewhere. Professor Jones said it was an obvious practice long considered essential in the corporate world. "Any na�ve observer who knows about computer system management and who knows there is a requirement that all the records be stored for a period of months," Professor Jones said, "would say you should obviously do that with computerized voting systems." Buddy Johnson, the elections supervisor in Hillsborough County, which is one of the state's largest counties and which also uses touch-screen machines, said his office still had its data from the 2002 elections on separate hard drives. Mr. Kaplan of the Miami-Dade elections office could not immediately explain on Tuesday afternoon the system crashes in 2003. Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor and member of the election reform group, said she requested the 2002 audit data because she had never heard an explanation of the supposedly lost votes that the A.C.L.U. documented after the Reno-McBride election. "People can never be sure their vote was recorded the way it was cast, but these are the best records we've got," she said. "And now they're not there." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/28/p...cffb7fd8dd10fcb |
Memo shows Florida officials knew of voter list problems
They knew about it before it was sent to election officials. In case you wish not to put 2 and 2 together, this entails that they knew the list was riddled with problems from the get go (the Florida election officials), yet they sent it out regardless.
IF the media news outlets and other politicians hadn't done their job in seeking a FOIA for seeing the names on that list, who the hell knows what would have happened come election time. Nice to see the media actually being on top of things, for a change.
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| Posted on Sun, Aug. 01, 2004 ELECTIONS Florida knew of voter list problems BY DAVID KIDWELL [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - Well before they abruptly discarded it, Florida election officials knew they had significant problems with a database of felons they planned to use in removing voters from the rolls. Just a week before they directed local election chiefs to begin purging ineligible voters from the list of 48,000 convicted felons, state officials documented two years of failures and breakdowns with the $2.7 million contract with database vendor Accenture. A May 2 internal memo, ordered personally by Secretary of State Glenda Hood, details a half dozen missed deadlines and broken promises, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems. Two months after the memo, with newspapers including The Herald detailing major flaws with the felon database that could have disenfranchised thousands, the state reversed course and told election chiefs not to use the felon list. The problems outlined in the five-page memo do not directly foreshadow the exact glitches that forced the state to abandon the list. But the memo makes clear that the state was hitting constant hurdles in its quest to rush out a list of voters who could be deleted from the rolls. Critics who have closely monitored Florida's voting process say the chronology shows that the state was negligent. ''This memo is striking,'' said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ``After two years of constant failures and fixes . . . they rushed this out the door. ``We are talking about one of our most fundamental rights, the right to vote. Maybe they should have considered the possibility that accuracy was more important than speed.'' State officials say their intentions were merely to remove ineligible voters. In Florida, convicted felons cannot vote unless the right is restored. MOVING SWIFTLY Yet a former official involved in the process acknowledged that the state was moving rapidly. 'We were quickly approaching the `drop dead' date, when we knew it would be too late to put it out there for the election,'' Ed Kast, the former director of the Division of Elections, who retired in June, said in an interview. ''Of course we were frustrated. We all wanted to know why it couldn't get done faster,'' he said. Executives at Accenture, one of the world's largest technology consulting firms, were caught unaware by the memo when contacted by The Herald. The newspaper obtained it in a public records request. ''We've never seen this document before,'' said Jim McAvoy, spokesman for Accenture. He acknowledged some ``technical and staffing issues, which resulted in a delay of approximately five months.'' But he said the state asked for many changes that helped exacerbate delays. He declined to discuss specific details of the memo, saying the company intends to discuss them first with state auditors looking into the problems. The memo came just days before state officials were going to order local election chiefs to use the database to remove thousands of ineligible voters. The Herald obtained the list and, on July 2, reported that it contained more than 2,100 felons whose voting rights had been restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black. As The Herald was preparing its report, a Tallahassee judge ordered the Division of Elections to make the database public. Less than a week later, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and The New York Times reported that Hispanics -- who tend to vote Republican -- were largely excluded from the list because a criminal records database the state was using to find ineligible voters doesn't use Hispanic as a race. Thus, many Hispanic voters with criminal records were excluded from the list given to local election chiefs, a striking lapse. The flaws prompted Hood to pull back the list on July 10. PROBLEMS DOCUMENTED Yet well before then, the state documented a morass. Many of the problems involved computer runs that failed, programming flaws or miscommunications among the state, contractor and subcontractor. Among them: � Rapid turnover and inexperience. Three different project managers were assigned by Accenture in the final year alone. One database administrator sent in February ''had no prior experience with this application,'' the memo says. � Missed deadlines, the first coming on June 30, 2003. One of the reasons: A technical representative suddenly left the company and didn't transfer her work to anyone else, the memo said. As late as April, state overseers found a series of yet ''more errors'' by Accenture, a $13.4 billion Bermuda-based consulting firm with 94,000 employees in 48 countries. Dawn Roberts, who replaced Kast in June, said the memo was generated on the orders of her boss, Hood. ''I think she was getting a lot of questions from reporters and from critics,'' Roberts said. ``She asked for the answers in writing.'' `COMPLEX PROBLEM' Both Kast and Roberts say that despite the frustrations, the division was confident of the final product. ''This was a very complex project,'' Roberts said. ``Our staff was intricately involved all along, checking and double-checking. It wasn't like we just got it one day and put it out there.'' Roberts also said election supervisors were told to first investigate names on the list before removing anyone. Yet many local supervisors found the last-minute list burdensome and feared that it included voters who should not be removed from the rolls. Several refused to use it. Citing two ongoing internal investigations, the Elections Division refused to allow The Herald to interview other key people. Nor has the state fully responded to a Herald request for the documents used to compile the memo. http://www.miami.com |
Update: Harris, Hood gave flawed voter list
Anyone still believe in the integrity of Florida conservatives with these voting stints?:
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| Harris, Hood gave state flawed felon voter list By Palm Beach Post Editorial Wednesday, August 04, 2004 When it came to lost election data in Miami-Dade County � information that was nearly two years old � Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent in a team to make sure that local errors didn't make the state look bad. If only she had worried as much about the actions of her own Division of Elections. Ms. Hood oversaw distribution of a faulty list meant to block felons who had not obtained clemency from voting. She wasted $150,000 trying to keep the list from being made public. Within weeks of its release, newspapers documented errors that made the state look as if it was trying to keep blacks, but not Hispanics, from voting. Ms. Hood dumped the list. How did it get that far? Ms. Hood has asked her inspector general to investigate. The audit will have to start in 2001, when Ms. Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris, thwarted the Legislature's will to assure that her office would control the list. The 2001 election reform law called for the list to be compiled by the Florida Association of Court Clerks, which had experience conducting similar database analysis. Then-Division of Elections chief Clay Roberts told legislators that the clerks wanted too much money, but memos published by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune showed that the clerks had agreed to do the work for the amount spelled out by the Legislature, $525,000 a year. Mr. Roberts' impossible-to-document explanation to the newspaper � that the group later made a verbal demand for more money � was denied by the clerks association. But the Legislature bought it. Mr. Roberts hired Accenture, a Bermuda-based company that used to be called Andersen Consulting, a subsidiary of Arthur Andersen. It changed its name after the accounting firm became caught up in the Enron scandal. Accenture's lobbyists included former Jeb Bush aide Brian Yablonski and the law firm of Van Poole, a former state Republican chairman. Accenture gave $300,000 in campaign contributions, favoring Republicans two-to-one, the Herald-Tribune reported. Mr. Roberts also decided to use race to match felons on one list with voters on another list, even though the felons list didn't offer Hispanic as a choice. The move guaranteed that Hispanics wouldn't make the list. This week, The Miami Herald reported that a state memo that Ms. Hood had ordered said, "It becomes apparent... that Accenture's Fayetteville office does not understand the relationship between the matching tables." Even though some state workers recognized the problems, Ms. Hood moved blithely forward, distributed the flawed list to county election officials in May and retracted it only after public scrutiny in July. The state paid Accenture $1.8 million to compile the list. Katherine Harris told legislators that an audit of the list, costing $300,000, would be a waste of money. It turns out she was right. The newspapers did it for free. Find this article at: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinio...aedit_0804.html |
Another article about the inaccuracies of touch-screen voting, this one from the Florida 2002 Governor election:
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| Touch-screens dealt a blow BY GARY FINEOUT [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - While state election officials publicly proclaim their faith in touch-screen voting machines in the midst of criticism, their own reports may have been the first to highlight potential shortcomings in the technology more than 18 months ago. In January 2003, state election officials reported that there was a higher rate of so-called undervotes among voters using the ATM-style equipment than those voters who mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner. At the time, the Florida Division of Elections compiled a detailed report that looked at how each county's voting equipment performed during the 2002 general election, when Gov. Jeb Bush defeated Democratic challenger Bill McBride. Bush received 2.85 million votes to McBride's 2.2 million votes. The report shows that more than 44,000 votes weren't counted in the governor's race because of undervotes, overvotes and problems with absentee ballots. Of that total, about 34,000 were undervotes -- in which voters apparently failed to make a choice at all. Many election officials maintain that there is no way to tell for sure why someone chooses not to vote in a particular race or election contest. But the state report, which was sent to Bush and the Florida Legislature, shows that counties that used touch-screen machines reported a higher percentage of undervotes than counties that rely on optical scanner machines. The undervote rate for the 52 counties that used optical scanners was 0.33 percent of all votes cast, compared to 0.92 percent for the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines. More than 4,600 Miami-Dade voters, or 0.91 percent of those who voted, did not cast a ballot in the governor's race. In Broward the number was about 4,000, or 0.90 percent. For touch-screen critics, the numbers reinforce their suspicions about the machines, since touch-screen machines warn voters if they have failed to vote in any race, while optical scanner machines don't warn when there is more than one race on the ballot. 'The fact that our undervote report is three times lower, which is without a warning, just adds to the question of, `What's going on here?' '' said Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, which uses optical scan machines. But state officials point out that the report also shows that in 2002, Florida achieved a dramatic reduction in the number of votes that weren't counted compared to the 2000 presidential election. The overall percentage of votes that weren't counted -- which includes overvotes and undervotes -- went from nearly 3 percent in 2000 to less than 1 percent two years later. The report also shows that touch-screen machines allowed zero overvotes, where a voter accidentally selects more than one candidate in a race. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood contended the undervote difference between touch-screen machines and optical scanners was insignificant. ''Historically, the rates are at an all-time low,'' Jenny Nash said. ``The rates may be different but it's still less than 1 percent.'' For weeks, critics of touch-screen machines have seized on reports of glitches and lost data as a reason why Hood or Bush should demand a statewide audit of voting systems in Florida. They have also cited a recent report that showed that, in the March 2004 presidential primary, there was a higher percentage of undervotes in counties that use touch-screen machines compared to those that rely on optical scanners. Some of the most constant critics have been Democratic politicians, which has prompted Bush to complain that those attacking the machines are partisans bent on motivating voters to defeat his brother, President Bush. Today in Tallahassee, Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein and House Democratic Leader Doug Wiles plan to discuss ways to ``restore voter confidence.'' Klein said Wednesday that he was unaware of the 2003 report, but the Boca Raton Democrat said it reinforces the concerns that he has about voting systems in Florida. ''It seems unlikely that there would be a 3-1 margin between a community that has optical scan versus one with a touch-screen,'' said Klein. Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan, said Wednesday that Kaplan was unfamiliar with the report since it was compiled months before she took over the elections office in the summer of 2003. Indian River Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem, whose county is one of those that use touch-screen machines, downplayed the significance of the state report. She pointed out that the 2002 election was the first time that many voters first saw the machines. She predicted that as voters become more comfortable with touch-screen voting, the amount of undervotes will decline. ''It was the first time that many of these people have used this equipment,'' Clem said. ``I think we will see a dramatic improvement in undervotes as we go through more elections.'' http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral.../printstory.jsp |
I'm not going to quote the entire thing because it's far too large, but here's another article about for potential for fraud in the upcoming election:
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| On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes. The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17]. The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire. About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks. The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's largest election company at that time, puts it well: "The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count." |
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