Riddled

    

Many voters not yet back on rolls

BY GARY FINEOUT
Miami Herald

TALLAHASSEE - With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.

Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.

Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida's largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.

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The fact that many counties have yet to add voters back to the rolls comes at the same time that election supervisors across Florida are being asked to look at purging more than 47,000 voters that the state has identified as possible felons who are ineligible to vote under state law.

NO DEADLINE

But state election officials say there is no deadline for when counties must reinstate voters who may have been wrongly removed four years ago. That upsets some of the groups that sued the state over its 1999 and 2000 purge lists.

''It's scandalous that the state has not simply undone the error that was done in 2000,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ``It calls into question this and so many other issues and makes you wonder, how much has really changed four years after the 2000 election?''
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CCURACY QUESTIONED

Prior to the contested 2000 election, then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired an Atlanta company to develop lists of felons, deceased people and those with duplicate registrations to distribute to county supervisors.

But the accuracy of lists distributed in both 1999 and 2000 came under fire from some supervisors who ignored them, saying they were riddled with errors. Other counties used the lists without verifying their accuracy. Those lists included the names of voters who had been convicted of felonies in other states, some of which automatically restore voting rights to convicts after they are released from prison. Florida requires felons convicted in the state to apply to have their civil rights restored.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and several other civil rights groups sued the state and a handful of counties in 2001. In a settlement in September 2002, the state agreed to hand out a new list of ''false positives'' -- voters who were included on the 1999 and 2000 lists but would not show up under more stringent matching criteria. One of those new criteria includes relying on Florida conviction data only, instead of relying on arrest records from other states.
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The question that remains for those 34 counties that have yet to report back to the state is whether they will have the time to restore voters prior to the 2004 election. County elections offices are already gearing up for the elections, as well as processing amendment-petition signatures that take time to verify.

FELONS FIRESTORM

And earlier this month, state election officials added another job: the possible purging of more than 47,000 voters that state officials have listed on a statewide central voter database as felons who shouldn't be allowed to vote. Of those identified, nearly a third, or 15,500, are registered in three South Florida counties: Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.

This latest list has created a firestorm, especially from the ACLU's Simon, who has pleaded with county supervisors to request independent verification before jettisoning any voters from their lists.

Simon has cited a past state elections division memo that pointed out that the data compiled by the state -- which relies primarily on conviction information from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement -- may have mistakes.

Leon County's Olin says her elections office has already found errors in this latest state list.

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