Florida Central Voter File - Election law violations allegations lawsuits

The severe problems with the list, and the process by which it was manufactured and deployed, as well as other issues related to the 2000 election controversy in Florida, became the subject of much criticism and allegations of fraud, which resulted in investigations, litigation, and reform measures. Phyllis Hampton, general counsel of the Florida Elections Commission, testified that her office could investigate the wrongful removal of a Floridian from the voter rolls if there was evidence of a willful violation. Ms. Hampton stated:

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There were many specific problems with the purge list regarding the verification of felons, including over 4,000 blank conviction dates, and over 325 conviction dates dating in the future. There were also nearly 3,000 out-of-state ex-felons with voting rights restored, as well as voters linked to felonies in states which do not remove felons from voting rolls or that automatically restore voting rights (who, according to a 1998 ruling by the 2nd Distri ...

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In time, an appeals process was instituted, but in some cases it required ordinary citizens to be fingerprinted in order to prove they were not the felons they were accused of being. In the end, out of 4,847 people who appealed, 2,430 were judged not to be convicted felons. As Civil Rights Commission attorney Bernard Quarterman put it during testimony in Miami on February 16, "They were guilty until proven innocent". At least 108 legitimate voters were not purged from the list until after the election. Some voters on the list did not receive advance notice that they were ineligible to vote until they appeared at the polls ...

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Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state (Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush) distributed the scrub lists produced by the cleansing process to counties, and ordered the 57,700 people identified as "ex-felons" to be removed from voter rolls. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 % of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 % of its African-American voters. At the time of the election, the purge list contained an inordinate number of false po ...

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Florida Central Voter File, Florida Central Voter File - Private involvement, Florida Central Voter File - Problems in the cleansing process, Florida Central Voter File - James Lee's testimony, Florida Central Voter File - Errors in the list, Florida Central Voter File - Demographics of the purge list, Florida Central Voter File - Pre-election cleansing, Florida Central Voter File - Details about the errors, Florida Central Voter File - Analysis, Florida Central Voter File - Appeals, Florida Central Voter File - Election law violations allegations lawsuits, Florida Central Voter File - Resources, Florida Central Voter File - Major sources, Florida Central Voter File - Minor sources

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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 t ...

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What makes the Central Voter File remarkable is that Florida is the only state that pays a private company to "cleanse" voter rolls. In 1998, the first firm hired for this program was Professional Service Inc., which charged $5,700 for the job. There was an open bid for the job, which was assigned to DBT Online's, despite the fact that its bid was the highest-priced (several thousand percent over competitors). The state gave the job to DBT for a first year fee of $2,317,800. In the files about the DBT bid there appears a handwritten note which reads "don't need" next to the listing of v ...

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Florida Central Voter File, Florida Central Voter File - Private involvement, Florida Central Voter File - Problems in the cleansing process, Florida Central Voter File - James Lee's testimony, Florida Central Voter File - Errors in the list, Florida Central Voter File - Demographics of the purge list, Florida Central Voter File - Pre-election cleansing, Florida Central Voter File - Details about the errors, Florida Central Voter File - Analysis, Florida Central Voter File - Appeals, Florida Central Voter File - Election law violations allegations lawsuits, Florida Central Voter File - Resources, Florida Central Voter File - Major sources, Florida Central Voter File - Minor sources

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