Home > Thousands of eligible voters are on felon list
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD, JASON GROTTO AND DAVID KIDWELL
More than 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.
A Florida Division of Elections database lists more
than 47,000 people the department said may be
ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state
is directing local elections offices to check the list
and scrub felons from voter rolls.
But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those
names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be
on the list because their rights to vote were formally
restored through the state’s clemency process.
That’s a potentially jarring flaw, critics say, in a
state that turned the 2000 presidential election to
Gov. Jeb Bush’s brother George on the narrowest of
margins — 537 votes.
Florida — one of just six states that don’t allow
felons to vote — has come under intense criticism over
its botched attempts to purge felons since the bitterly
contested 2000 presidential election, when myriad
problems prompted many elections officials to ignore
the purge altogether.
The new list is causing its own problems, raising more
questions about the fairness and accuracy of the
state’s efforts to purge the voter rolls of ineligible
voters.
State elections officials acknowledge there may be
mistakes on the list but insist they have built in
safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed
by local election offices. They say they have warned
election offices to be diligent before eliminating
voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters
on the list may have regained their rights.
"We have been very clear that this database is not to
be considered the final word," Paul Craft, chief of the
division’s bureau of voting systems, said Thursday. "We
have told the local supervisors they need to be very
careful with it."
INCREASES RISKS
Yet local officials, already overburdened preparing for
the election, say shifting the burden to them is
opening the door for major problems.
"I have never seen such an incompetent program
implemented by the DOE," said Leon County elections
chief Ion Sancho.
Sancho said his office has already found people in the
state’s felon voter database who have received
clemency.
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan
said she, too, intends to err on the side of voters.
"This concerns me," Kaplan said of The Herald’s
findings. "That’s why I’m not having my staff jump to
start any process until we can make 100 percent sure
that it is the correct person."
Craft said his office continuously checks the database
against a list of felons who have received clemency —
which includes the right to vote — and that 10,000
felons have already been taken off the list because of
the clemency match.
Craft and other elections officials on Thursday
declined to discuss why The Herald found another 2,119
voters in the database who have received clemency.
"We can’t speculate on the methodology you used," Craft
said. "It is a matter that requires further
investigation."
CLOSE SCRUTINY
Elections officials said some voters with clemency
could have been left on the list because records show
they registered to vote before their rights were
restored.
Dawn Roberts, director of the Division of Elections,
said the process used to clean the voter rolls has been
"vetted at the highest levels of the Department of
Justice" and negotiated with civil rights groups such
as the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.
Those assurances offered scant consolation to Mary
Catherine Lane, 51, of Miami, who was 18 when she was
arrested for robbery in 1972.
"That just makes me angry," Lane, a registered
Democrat, said when told she was on the list.
"I got a pardon on Dec. 14, 1998, signed by Gov. Lawton
Chiles and everything. And now they’re doing this to
me? I served every day of my sentence plus some for bad
behavior," she said.
’DON’T LIKE IT’
Norman Carter, 45, of Fort Lauderdale, also on the
list, keeps his May 20, 2003, clemency papers folded in
his Bible.
"I don’t appreciate it, I don’t like it and I wish I
knew what I could do about it," said Carter, a
Democrat, convicted of dealing in stolen property in
1988.
"I know how critical these elections have been lately,"
he said.
Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent
are registered Democrats, and almost half are black.
Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are
very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who
the local elections officers are supposed to review and
possibly purge from the registration rolls.
"It’s just not right," said state Rep. Chris Smith, who
represents and lives in a Fort Lauderdale neighborhood
hit hardest by the list, the city’s historic black
neighborhood.
"Those who have been disenfranchised before seem to be
continually disenfranchised by our archaic laws," Smith
said.
WERE NEVER TOLD
Several of the three dozen voters on the state list
interviewed by The Herald were not aware that their
rights had been restored through the clemency process.
"I’m upset because I had clemency all these years and
nobody told me," said Roger Maddox, 51, a Miami
Democrat who received clemency in 1977 for a 1973 theft
conviction.
"Now I’m on a purge list . . . man," he said.
Maddox said he intends to visit the Miami-Dade
elections office to get his name removed from the list.
"Give me the number, man. This is crazy."
Craft said it is possible that some names are
incorrectly included in the database because the match
was less then perfect when elections officials made
their comparisons.
To identify registered voters with felony convictions,
the Division of Elections compared names, birth dates,
Social Security numbers and other identifying
information.
Elections officials said there are 311 voters who may
have clemency who were left on the list.
"But in each case the database is flagged so the
supervisors of elections know there was a match of some
kind," Craft said. "The supervisors know automatically
that those 311 potentially have clemency."
SOME NAMES FLAGGED
County elections supervisors interviewed acknowledged
that some of the names are flagged. But they wonder why
it is that already overburdened elections employees
should investigate facts the state has not been able to
definitively answer itself.
Kay Clem, elections supervisor in Indian River County,
said her staff "is dealing with terms they’ve never
heard of before. We need a lot more training."
Clem said her office is hiring a private company to
investigate the 365 names that appear on its list.
"This is putting us in a very precarious situation,"
Clem said.
INVESTIGATE VOTERS
All county elections supervisors are required to
investigate each voter on the list, verify whether or
not he or she is eligible to vote, then notify by mail
suspected felons who have not had their civil rights
restored.
The certified letter is supposed to name a time and
place voters can appear to explain why they should
remain on the rolls.
If supervisors suspect the letters were not received,
they’re supposed to publish at least one notice in the
local newspaper.
If there’s no response within 30 days, supervisors must
remove the person from the rolls.
No one interviewed by The Herald — including 53-year-
old Walter Gibbons of Miami Gardens, a Vietnam veteran
convicted of drug possession in 1973 — had yet
received a letter.
"I don’t think it’s fair that they’re trying to stop me
from voting, because everybody that commits a crime
does not stay a criminal," said Gibbons, an ordained
minister granted clemency in 1978. "I had my error in
life, but that was a long time ago, over 30 years now,
and I’m a different person.’
Herald staff writers Debbie Cenziper, Casey Woods,
Maria Herrera and Trenton Daniel contributed to this
report.
Miami Herald