2000 Florida Election Controversy
Names were ordered by the Florida state government to include legal voters
At first, Florida specified only exact matches on names, birthdates and genders to identify voters as felons. However, state records reveal a memo dated March, 1999 from Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for the state elections office who was supervising the felon purge, asking DBT to loosen its criteria for acceptable matches. When DBT representatives warned Mitchell that this would yield a large proportion of "false positives" (mismatches), Mitchell's reply was that it would be up to each county elections supervisor to deal with the problem.
In February 2000, in a phone conversation to the BBC's London studios, ChoicePoint vice president James Lee said that the State "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon."
On April 17, 2001 ChoicePoint VP James Lee testified, before the McKinney panel, that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched 90 percent of a last name. DBT objected, knowing this would sweep in a huge number of innocents. The state then ordered DBT to shift to an 80 percent match. Names were also reversed — felon Thomas Clarence could knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. James Lee confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped, adding that nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list.