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Florida Elections: Deja Freakin' Vu All Over Again!
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| MisterOpus1 |
More voter purgin', comin' up:
| quote: | 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
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This ridiculous Florida law of keeping former felons from voting has really been grossly perverted by the GOPs in charge. When will this ever stop? |
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| smokeape |
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]]] |
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| 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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| Shakka |
| quote: | 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. |
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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| ResonantDrag |
| quote: | 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. |
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".:whip: |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | 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".:whip: |
Like I said, gray area.;) |
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| MisterOpus1 |
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:
| quote: | 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 really shows the dirtiness of Harris' protege (sp?).
Unfortunately some of those counties are still in the hands of Diebold's machines, which for some reason can't seem to spit out a voter verification (even though all their ATM's do so quite easily), and there's a laundry list of their machine's "quirks". I don't see too much to be done about this, however. |
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| ResonantDrag |
| It was just a minor oversite.. why can't you liberals just accept that mistakes happen.:p ;) |
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| Moongoose |
| There are too many minor mistakes in this whole mess to be disregarded as completely innocent ;) |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Well at least Florida's got those reliable touch-screens, right?:
| quote: | 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 |
Boy, thank God they've got those touchscreens now, right? Right? Guys? Hello? |
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| Galapidate |
| quote: | 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? |
:stongue:
I can't wait to see what'll happen in November... |
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| ResonantDrag |
| quote: | Originally posted by Galapidate
:stongue:
I can't wait to see what'll happen in November... |
passports handy? |
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