 | Florida Central Voter File: Encyclopedia II - Florida Central Voter File - Problems in the cleansing process
Florida Central Voter File - Problems in the cleansing process
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 with 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".
Florida Central Voter File - James Lee's testimony
On 17 April 2001, James Lee testified, before the McKinney panel, that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90 % of a last name. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non-felons).
Lee went on saying that the state then ordered DBT to shift to an even lower threshold of 80% match, allowing also names to be reversed (thus a person named Thomas Clarence could be taken to be the same as Clarence Thomas). Besides this, middle initials were skipped, Jr. and Sr. suffixes dropped, and some nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list.
"DBT told state officials", testified Lee, "that the rules for creating the [purge] list would mean a significant number of people who were not deceased, not registered in more than one county, or not a felon, would be included on the list. DBT made suggestions to reduce the numbers of eligible voters included on the list". According to Lee, to this suggestion the state told the company, "Forget about it".
"The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant... they told them what would happen", said Lee. "The state expected the county supervisors to be the failsafe." Lee said his company will never again get involved in cleansing voting rolls. "We are not confident any of the methods used today can guarantee legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote", Lee told a group of Atlanta-area black lawmakers in March. [1]
Florida Central Voter File - Errors in the list
Florida has had to correct its felon list five times since 1998 due to errors.
The first list DBT Online provided to the Division of Elections in April 2000 contained the names of 181,157 persons. Approximately 65,776 of those included on the first list were identified as felons.
In May 2000, DBT discovered that approximately 8,000 names were erroneously placed on the exclusion list, mostly those of former Texas prisoners who were included on a DBT list that turned out never to have been convicted of more than a misdemeanor. Later in the month, DBT provided a revised list to the Division of Elections (DOE) containing a total of 173,127 persons. Of those included on the "corrected list", 57,746 were identified as felons.
Florida Central Voter File - Demographics of the purge list
According to the Palm Beach Post, blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, though they make up only about 11% of Florida's voters. [2]
Voter demographics authority David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, reviewed The Nation's findings and concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters". He noted that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46% of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised.
The following is a breakdown of the distribution of the list for three major Florida counties:
None of the names on the list were Hispanic.
Other related archives1998, 1999, 2000, 2000 election controversy in Florida, American Civil Liberties Union, April 2001, Atlanta, Attorney General, BBC, ChoicePoint, Equal Protection Amendment, February 17th, February 2000, Florida, Georgia, Government of Florida, Greg Palast, History of voting rights in the United States, Jeb Bush, John Ashcroft, June 2001, London, March, March 1999, May 1999, May 21st, Miami, NAACP, National Voter Registration Act of 1993, Palm Beach Post, Social Security numbers, South Carolina, Tallahassee, Texas, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, The Nation, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, U.S. Justice Department, U.S. presidential election, 2000, US Constitution, United States, Voting Rights Act of 1965, aliases, clemency, databases, false positives, fingerprinted, fraud, governor, misdemeanor, nicknames
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Problems in the cleansing process", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
