In the summer of 2004 the state of Florida found itself wrapped in a controversy over a list of felons who were to be prohibited from voting in the 2004 elections. Felons do not have full civil rights in Florida and are not allowed to vote in state and national elections unless they receive clemency.
However, in the 2000 election in which George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by a mere 537 votes, up to 20,000 people who should not have been on the list were wrongly prohibited from voting. FloridaÂ’s election results, of course, swung the electoral college and thus the presidency to Bush.
The 2000 purge of ex-felons from FloridaÂ’s voter rolls resulted in numerous complaints of voter disenfranchisement, including lawsuits from the NAACP and the ACLU seeking voter reform.
As a result of the NAACP lawsuit in 2000, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hired Accenture, a global management consulting company, to assemble an updated list that would prevent felons without clemency from voting while allowing those who had received clemency to cast ballots.
It took more than two years for Accenture to assemble the list, which came to contain 47,000 names. The list was finally released to county officials in May, six months before the 2004 elections, but was not released to the public at that time.
The felons list returned to the news pages as the 2004 elections approached. Reporters consulted their 2000 clip files and went forth to learn from the Florida Division of Elections whether the voter irregularities of four years earlier had been corrected.
In response to a lawsuit filed by CNN requesting access to the list, Circuit Court Judge Nikki Clark ruled on July 1 that the list must be made public to prevent massive voter disenfranchisement.
But a week before the public release of the felon-voter list, a reporter for The Miami Herald obtained a leaked copy from a confidential source. Upon receiving the list, a team of three Herald reporters -- Erika Bolstad, Jason Grotto and David Kidwell -- analyzed it and found inconsistencies.
The July 1 court ruling forced the Herald reporters to speed up, and on July 2 they broke a story disclosing that 2,119 of the ex-felons listed shouldnÂ’t have been included because their right to vote had been restored. More striking was that the people who were incorrectly included on the list were disproportionately black Democrats.
Five days after The Miami Herald story broke, two reporters from The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Chris Davis and Matthew Doig, broke a story exposing that the list inexplicably excluded Hispanics. Hispanics in Florida tend to support the Republican Party, which is the party of Gov. Jeb Bush, the presidentÂ’s brother and ultimate keeper of the felons list.
On July 10, three days after The Sarasota Herald-Tribune story ran, The New York Times ran a story explaining that Florida election officials had used a flawed method to determine which names should be included on the list.
Later that day, after attacking The Herald’s initial story as “factually inaccurate” and refusing to acknowledge serious problems for a week, the state of Florida officially scrapped the controversial list.
