R
Tallahassee Democrat
Posted on Wed, May. 19, 2004
Secrecy surrounds voter eligibility Thousands may be struck from rolls By Nancy Cook Lauer DEMOCRAT CAPITOL BUREAU CHIEF
The state has identified 47,687 Florida voters - 1,671 in the Big Bend alone - as suspected felons possibly ineligible to vote. Who's on the list? It's hard to know, thanks to an unusual veil of secrecy. The state, while acknowledging the list is a public record, refuses to allow more than quick inspections of it, with no note-taking or photocopying allowed.
Civil-liberties groups and open-records advocates are questioning the secrecy, especially in light of the black eye the state suffered in the 2000 presidential election, when perhaps thousands of legitimate voters were erroneously struck from the rolls. As the 2004 election nears, state, national and even international groups are monitoring the state's progress.
"It's an atrocity," said Sharon Lettman-Pacheco of the People for the American Way Foundation. "They're coming up with a whole lot of legal barricades to not allow advocacy groups to assist the citizens."
People for the American Way sent letters to all 67 county elections supervisors, offering to help notify people in danger of being purged. In response, state Elections Director Ed Kast sent a memo to supervisors last week telling them they don't have to comply with the group's request for the list. The Division of Elections says it's only following the law - a law that allows voter registration lists to be dispensed to candidates, political parties, political committees and public officials, but not to the general public or the press. Those allowed to get the list must sign an oath saying they'll use it only to conduct political campaigns.
Department of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said anyone can view the list, so there shouldn't be a controversy.
Inaccurate lists of felons
The law has been on the books in some form for county voter rolls since as early as 1913, but it was expanded as part of the massive overhaul of state election laws in 2001.
Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, says attorneys in her organization are looking into whether the law was expanded improperly. The state constitution requires any law limiting public records to be passed as a separate bill, with a specific statement of why it's necessary. Possibly thousands of voters were turned away from the polls in 2000 because the Division of Elections sent counties an inaccurate list of 173,142 felons and others not qualified to vote.
"When they went to vote, they were told they were criminals, and their names had been purged from the files. We got a great number of calls," said Anita Davis, then president of the Tallahassee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
It's not known how many people were erroneously barred from voting. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said his office could verify that only 34 on the list of 694 supposed felons in his county were actually felons ineligible to vote.
Five counties - including Palm Beach, Broward and Duval, three of the state's largest - refused to use the list at all.
The NAACP and other civil-rights groups sued elections officials, alleging that blacks had been denied their voting rights.
Settlement brings changes
The suit was settled in 2002, with the state agreeing to restore the names of voters improperly removed, implement more stringent criteria for verifying names on future lists and create a new position to monitor compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.
The new system more closely matches state felons against the voter rolls before creating the potential purge list, Nash said. The list is then sent to county supervisors, who must notify suspected felons and give them a chance to prove they're not felons before purging them.
"If the supervisor can't determine, yes, that's a definite match, then the voter stays on the rolls," Nash said.
Sancho said he isn't taking any chances that voters could be dissuaded from voting simply by getting a registered letter or seeing an ad in the paper saying the state considers them felons.
"That's not legally justifiable, and it's not how we operate," Sancho said. "We have to do a thorough, full-scale investigation before we send out any registered letter. We will do the research before we identify any person in the newspaper as a potential felon."
Contact Capitol Bureau Chief Nancy Cook Lauer at (850) 671-6547 or nlauer at tallahassee.com.