Florida officials back down on voter purge list
Just eight days after a circuit judge ordered elections officials to make the list public, Florida Department of State has withdrawn their list of over 47,000 ex-felons they wanted removed from the voter rolls. The list was so flawed that Supervisors of Elections across the state were asking why they should use it. People around Florida were finding their names on the list when they had committed no felony or had long since gone through the onerous process of getting their civil rights restored. On July 9, Florida Department of State officials announced that they were withdrawing the list because a database error meant they failed to purge voters with Latino surnames who they claimed had committed a felony.
At first, the state of Florida had refused to release the list to the public. Then, when the Leon County Circuit Court ordered them to release it, the press, civil rights groups, and public officials started to actually check the list to see whether the people on it should be eligible to vote or not. Many were stunned to discover that the State of Florida had targeted them for disenfranchisement.
"I have never seen such an incompetent program implemented by the DOE [Department of Elections]," Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho told the Miami Herald shortly after state officials released the list. On July 2 the Herald wrote that "2,100 Florida voters--many of them black Democrats--could be wrongly barred from voting in November because Tallahassee elections officials included them on a list of felons potentially ineligible to vote, a Herald investigation has found." The Herald found that at least 2,119 of the 47,000 names "should not be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state's clemency process." ("Thousands of eligible voters are on felon list," Miami Herald, July 2, 2004.)
"Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency [but who were on the purge list], 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black," noted the Herald. "Less than 20 percent are Republican."
For the 2000 elections in Leon County, the Supervisor of Elections could only verify 34 actual felons out of a list of 694 names provided by the state.