By Jueseppi B.

The Florida Central Voter File was an internal list of legally eligible voters used by the US Florida Department of State Division of Elections to monitor the official voter lists maintained by the 67 county governments in the State of Florida between 1998 and January 1, 2006. The exclusion of eligible voters from the file was a central part of the controversy surrounding the US presidential elections in 2000, which hinged on results in Florida. The ‘Florida Central Voter File’ was replaced by the Florida Voter Registration System on January 1, 2006 when a new federal law, the Help America Vote Act, came into effect.

Private involvement

At that time, Florida was the only state that paid a private company to purge the voter file of ineligible voters, in effect allowing a private company to make the administrative decision of who is not eligible to vote.

The State of Florida’s Division of Elections was required to contract with a private entity to purge its voter file by chapter 98.0975 of the Florida statutes, which had been enacted by the Florida legislature to address voter registration fraud found during the 1997 Miami mayoral election, according to the United States Civil Rights Commission Report on 2000 Florida Elections.

Previously voter purging had been conducted (sometimes controversially) by local elections officials. During the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, local elections officials in southern states, including Florida, were the subjects of lawsuits, marches and civil disobedience as African-Americans attempted to register to vote. This led to the passage of the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act banning discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans off the voter rolls.

The first firm hired on 1998 to purge the voter rolls was Professional Service Inc., which charged $5,700 for the job. Later in the same year, the state placed an open request for tenders to bid for the job. The contract was assigned to DBT Onlines, despite the fact that its bid was the highest-priced. The state gave the job to DBT for a first year fee of US $2,317,800 with total fees eventually reaching US $4 million  The Florida Department of Elections terminated Professional Service Inc.’s contract in 1999. DBT Online was later acquired by ChoicePoint, of Atlanta, in early 2000.

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”.

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 2001.

Errors in the list

Florida has re-edited its felon list five times since 1998 to correct 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.

Examples:

• Thomas Cooper, Date of Birth September 5, 1973; crime, unknown; conviction date, January 30, 2007
• Johnny Jackson Jr., Date of Birth, 1970; crime, none, mistaken for John Fitzgerald Jackson who was still in his jail cell in Texas
• Wallace McDonald, Date of Birth, 1928; crime, fell asleep on a bus-stop bench in 1959
• Reverend Willie Dixon, convicted in the 1970s at the latest; note, received full executive clemency
• Randall J. Higginbotham, Date of Birth, August 28, 1960; crimes, none, mistaken for Sean David Higginbotham, born June 16, 1971
• Reverend Willy D. Whiting Jr., crime, a speeding ticket from 1990, confused with Willy J. Whiting who have birthdays 2 days apart

Demographics of the purge list

According to the Palm Beach Post, among other problems with the list, although blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida’s voters.

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.

Pre-election cleansing

Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state, Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, 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 a number of false positives — people identified as felons who were not actually felons.

Details about the errors

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.

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, were included on the list. According to a 1998 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeals, they cannot then be ruled ineligible by another state.

DBT had decided in March 1999 not to include felon lists from South Carolina or Texas, which automatically restore voting rights, but that was overruled by the head of the Florida Office of Executive Clemency, Janet Keels, who ordered inclusion of any felon who did not have a written order of clemency, even from these states, wrongly placing 996 voters on the felon list. Florida did not restore their voting rights until three months after the election.

Additionally, a number of persons listed as felons had been convicted of misdemeanors only, and therefore were eligible by law.

Greg Palast, who has investigated this issue and identified occurrences of these problems, provides a sample of 23 names as they appear on the Florida 2000 felons list, with five examples of these erroneous listings highlighted (this represents a minimum rate of inaccuracy of 22% in this sample). Thomas Cooper, the second one in the list, was listed as being convicted on January 30, 2007.

Analysis

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said that the national figure for “standard” margin of error for legal disenfranchisement is about 2%.

Database experts consulted by Greg Palast (including DBT’s vice-president) told him that in order to obtain 85% accuracy or better, one needs at least the following three things:

• Social Security numbers;
• Address history;
• A check against other databases.

ChoicePoint, in contrast, used virtually no Social Security numbers, did not check address histories, and used no database cross-checking, although it had 1,200 databases that could be employed for the task.

Because some of the source databases used did not list race, the matching criteria did not require a match with the voter’s race for inclusion in the felon list. However, the decision was also made to enlarge upon this decision, and rule as ineligible the voter in question even if there was an explicit disagreement between the races listed on the source database and the voter list. According to the Palm Beach Post, more than 1,300 registered voters were matched with felons although their races or sexes were different.

Mark Hull, the former senior programmer for CDB Infotek, a ChoicePoint company, said the state and ChoicePoint could have chosen criteria that would have brought down the number of false positives to less than 1%. George W. Bush officially received fewer than 600 more votes in Florida than Al Gore (2000 presidential election).

The only reliable measure of accuracy of the felon list comes from Leon County (Tallahassee), whose in-house experts checked each name in their county one by one. Out of the 694 named felons in Tallahassee, they could verify only 34 of them, or 5%.

The Palm Beach Post reported that

“[C]omputer analysis has found at least 1,100 eligible voters wrongly purged from the rolls before last year’s election. [...] At least 108 law-abiding people were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election. DBT’s computers had matched these people with felons, though in dozens of cases they did not share the same name, birthdate, gender or race. One Naples man was told he couldn’t vote because he was linked with a felon still serving time in a Moore Haven prison. Florida officials cut from the rolls 996 people convicted of crimes in other states, though they should have been allowed to vote. Before the election, state officials said felons could vote only if they had written clemency orders, although most other states automatically restore voting rights to felons when they complete their sentences. [...] Records used to create the felon list were sometimes wrong. A state database of felons wrongly included dozens of people whose crimes were reduced to misdemeanors. Furthermore, clemency records were incomplete.”

Additionally, there are other accuracy problems with the list. For example, Linda Howell, Madison County supervisor of elections, who is not a convicted felon and was never on the felon list provided by the Division of Elections or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, erroneously received a form letter referencing a prior felony conviction from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement stating:

“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) received your Voter Registration Appeal Form. After reviewing your Florida criminal history, we have determined that you have a Florida felony conviction in our repository. FDLE will notify your supervisor of elections that we have data indicating that you meet the criteria of a convicted felon.”

Ms. Howell recalled, “I had sent the letter to one of my voters and he sent in the verification form. Instead of picking up his name, they picked up my name and sent me the information.”

Rick Scott Purging Eligible Voters From Florida’s Rolls

Six members of Florida’s congressional delegation are pushing Gov. Rick Scott (R) to stop purging the state’s voting rolls of eligible voters, after numerous individuals were improperly flagged as non-citizens.

The state used an outdated driver’s license database in their initial effort to scrub non-citizens from the voting rolls. Officials believed that 182,000 voters on the rolls were non-citizens, and began sending out notifications that required voters to prove their citizenship within 30 days.

But plenty of legal U.S. citizens who should be allowed to vote wound up on the purge list. In Miami-Dade County, 1,638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens,” yet at least 359 people provided the county with proof of citizenship and another 26 people were identified by the county as U.S. citizens, ThinkProgress reported. An analysis by the Miami Herald found that Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters were most likely to be targeted by the purge effort.

In a letter Tuesday to Scott, Reps. Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Corrine Brown, Frederica Wilson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kathy Castor asked Scott to stop the purge, arguing that the process “fails to meet the basic standards of accountability.”

The members of Congress wrote that it would be “irresponsible to proceed so quickly and with so little room for oversight.”

“If the goal is truly to remove ineligible individuals who were intentionally or somehow mistakenly registered to vote, then that process must move forward in a nonpartisan manner with transparency, uniformity and great care,” the members of Congress wrote.

The group wrote that it was “important to remember, Governor Scott, that Florida has never encountered problems with mass voter fraud. Unfortunately however, our state does have a troubled history of wrongfully purging from our rolls the names of legitimate voters mistakenly deemed ineligible to vote.”

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) said at a press conference that they “cannot sit idly by while Republicans use stories of mass voter fraud to justify passing laws that will disenfranchise our citizens,” according to his prepared remarks.

The Justice Department objected to changes to Florida’s voting laws back in March, arguing that the a shortened early voting period and strict regulations on third-party voter registration groups may have been passed with discriminatory intent.

It’s hardly a secret that Florida, home to 29 up-for-grabs electoral votes, will be one of the key 2012 battlegrounds. It’s the nation’s largest swing state, and whoever wins Florida will have an inside track to winning the White House.

Republicans in the Sunshine State, however, aren’t taking any chances, and are already taking steps to tilt the playing field.

Ari Berman has already documented many of the new voting restrictions approved by GOP policymakers over the last couple of years, including cracking down on voter-registration drives and limiting the number of days available for early voting.

But Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Rick Scott (R), aren’t quite done yet. In the newest push, the state, just six months before the election, is trying to purge non-citizens from the voting rolls, but in the process, has cast far too wide a net.

The state was found to be using a flawed process to pinpoint noncitizens on the voter rolls by relying on an outdated driver’s license database. Some of the people on an initial list of 2,700 possible noncitizens sent to county election supervisors were either naturalized citizens or were born in the United States.

The push to crack down on the way Floridians vote, and how they register to vote, is viewed by some as an effort to single out Democratic voters, many of them black and Hispanic. Florida has been accused in past elections of unfairly trying to remove from the rolls former felons who are eligible to vote.

The new scrub of registered voters is no different, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “It’s a purging process that is based on what the state already acknowledges to be inaccurate information,” Mr. Simon said. “It really raises questions as to whether or not this is yet another partisan effort to scrub the voting rolls. We know it’s inaccurate because people from as far away as Pensacola to Miami have come forward to say, ‘I am a U.S. citizen. I am eligible to vote.’ “

 

That’s not at all an exaggeration.

Judd Legum has been all over this story for the last several days, including this report yesterday on the GOP’s “sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan,” which ties together some key threads.

According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.

A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

“It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.

 

Polls show Florida will likely be very competitive in November, and if 2012 is anything like the last few cycles, a tiny number of votes may well be the difference between victory and failure.

This push to steal another election like was done in 2000 by Jeb Bush & Katherine Harris for Jeb’s brother, George Dubbya Bush,  should be unacceptable to ALL real true American voters. If your candidate can NOT win an election fair & square, then that candidate does NOT deserve to run for public office.

What does it say about a nation that resorts to stealing, dishonesty & underhanded racist activities to prevent the best man for the job of President Of The United States, solely because that man is a Black American?

It says America is the most racist society on the planet. Even as it pretends to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

If you are a caucasian male.

Filed under: 2012 Election, Causes, Court Room/Legal, Crime, History, News, Politics, POTUS Obama, Racism, The White House | Tagged: ChoicePoint, Clarence Thomas, DBT Online, DBT Onlines, Florida, Florida Central Voter File, Help America Vote Act, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, purging voter rolls, Rick Scott, United States, voter rights, Voter suppression | 2 Comments »