Jenny Brown nostalgic for Reconstruction
July 21. 2004 6:01AM Officials knew of voter list's race flaw
By CHRIS DAVIS and MATTHEW DOIG Sarasota Herald-Tribune
s far back as 1997, state election officials knew that using race to create a felon voter purge list could mean Hispanics wouldn't be included in the purge, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune has learned.
Elections officials studied the race issue for the purge conducted before the 2000 election, and again in 2001 as they developed the latest version of the list designed to keep felons from voting.
The decision to use race for the 2004 purge, knowing it could exclude Hispanics, renews questions about whether the error was intentional, said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton.
"It's a clear indication of a pattern of falsifying the voting process in Florida," Wexler said. "As we now learn more and more, the likelihood of a coincidence is just too great."
Wexler said the findings could warrant an investigation by the state attorney general's office, and Secretary of State Glenda Hood's removal from office.
Florida is one of seven states that does not automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons once they have completed their sentences.
Hood scrapped the purge list last week after it was reported that a data flaw led to the inclusion of just 61 Hispanics on the purge list, which includes nearly 48,000 names.
By comparison, there were about 22,000 blacks on the list.
Elections officials insist that the error was an oversight, not an attempt to purge black Democrats in 2004 and protect Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican.
"The secretary of state had absolutely no knowledge before recalling the list," Department of State spokeswoman Nicole de Lara said.
De Lara pointed out that Hood was not in office when the list was designed and that she has called for an audit of what led to the Hispanic flaw.
Although Hood took office after the list was designed, many of her employees worked on the current list and the one used in 2000.
Election officials were aware of matching difficulties involving Hispanic felo ns when they worked with DBT, a private company that helped build the 2000 purge list.
DBT, which was later bought by ChoicePoint, discussed the issue with data experts in the secretary of state's office in late 1997 or early 1998, said ChoicePoint spokesman Chuck Jones.
ChoicePoint and state officials analyzed the data together and recognized that using race would create an inaccurate list, he said.
"It was not part of the criteria because most of the data sets didn't support matching race," Jones said. "It was not reliable because of Hispanic or Latinos. We determined jointly that it was not reliable."
Jones cited Janet Modrow as one of the secretary of state employees who would have known about the race problem. Modrow also played a central role in developing the latest purge list. Modrow told the Herald-Tribune on Friday she needed permission from a secretary of state spokesperson before she could answer a reporter's questions.
Department of State records show that the issue of race came up again in October 2001, less than eight months before the unveiling of the Central Voter Database.
That database of the state's registered voters was partly designed to allow election officials to identify felons who were registered to vote.
Technical advisers charged with developing the database discussed race at the October meeting and concluded that Hispanic could not be used as a separate race category in creating the match, meeting minutes show.
The minutes show that the committee planned to group Hispanics with whites for matching purposes.
That step would have allowed Hispanics to be included in the felon list because Hispanics are reported in the white race categories in many voter registration databases and by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Chuck Smith, a Hillsborough County elections supervisor employee who served on the technical advisory committee, said he remembers a meeting where concerns about the use of race were raised.
Smith said the concern came up because the committee knew that voters couldn't report their race as Hispanic in most counties before 1994.
"Prior to 1994, everybody was considered to be white or black," Smith said. "It was kind of a weird merge thing."
Paul Craft, voting systems chief with the Division of Elections, said he also remembers discussing concerns over relying on race to match felons and voters.
But Craft said he forgot to mention those concerns to Clay Roberts, his boss at the time.
Roberts, the elections chief in 2002, made a decision that ultimately created the data flaw that omitted Hispanics.
In May 2002, just days before the voter database was unveiled, Roberts ordered a rewrite of the matching procedures.
He insisted that a registered voter's race match exactly with someone in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's database. Because the FDLE classifies Hispanics as white, Roberts' decision virtually ensured Hispanics would be excluded from the felon list.
Clay Roberts said Monday that he did not remember being at a meeting where the issue was addressed, but that he "vaguely" remembers there being some concerns about how race was kept in voter registration records before 1994.
Roberts said he attended many, but not all of the meetings.
"I couldn't tell you which ones I was at," said Roberts, who now works for the state Attorney General.
Howard Simon, executive director of Florida's American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday he finds it hard to believe that this mistake can be blamed on poor memory.
"I have to say, that's straining my patience in the extreme," he said. "It almost forces one to confront the fact that this may not have been the result of incompetence. It raises the question about whether it was by design."
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