How the GOP Gamed the System in Florida (Page 3)

Although the state claims the process of applying for clemency was simplified somewhat in 2000, only 927 former prisoners regained their civil rights last year, less than one-half of 1 percent of the former prisoners who had finished their sentences and parole. State Senator Meek, who has a large number of blacks in his constituency, says that of 175 former prisoners whom he has helped apply for clemency in the past decade, only nine have been approved.

According to the Washington-based Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization specializing in corrections issues, and Human Rights Watch, Florida is currently home to more disfranchised voters than any other state. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement admits that 187,455 former prisoners in Florida have been disfranchised because of felony convictions on their records. The state confirms that 17 percent of Florida's black voting-age males have been disfranchised. In addition, according to the Justice Department, Florida leads the nation in the rate at which juveniles are charged with felonies, meaning those youths lose the right to vote before they are ever able to exercise it.

"And every year the Florida legislature is trying to make more crimes felonies," says State Senator Daryl Jones of Miami. "Why? So they can eliminate more people from the voter rolls." In 2000, according to Jones, a bill was proposed by a GOP legislator that would have increased from 365 to 366 days the jail sentence for individuals who take two welfare checks after becoming employed. The bill was eventually defeated. "What does one more day accomplish?" asks Jones. "It makes it a felony, and you take one more person off the voter rolls. That's what. It's been going on in Tallahassee for years."

By April 1998 the laws and political will were in place to perform a definitive purge of voter rolls to remove people who had died, had been judged mentally unstable, had moved and were registered in more than one county or state--and, most significantly, had ever been convicted of a felony but had not had their rights restored by Florida's partisan Cabinet members.

The first list was produced by a Tallahassee firm, Professional Analytical Services and Systems, using state databases. The results proved to be full of errors. For one thing, the Florida Office of Executive Clemency had no database, so former prisoners who had won their rights back were often included on the list of felons barred from voting. On August 18, 1998, then-director of the Division of Elections Ethel Baxter, citing confidentiality concerns, ordered county elections supervisors not to release that list to the press, which almost certainly would have discovered the gross number of errors long before Election Day, and especially the impact on the black vote.

In November of that year, the state contracted with Database Technologies (DBT) of Boca Raton, which has since merged with ChoicePoint of Atlanta. DBT eventually produced two lists--one in 1999 and the second in 2000--that included a total of 174,583 alleged felons. Later, when lists of individuals who had received clemency were produced, that number was reduced, although only by a small percentage. The majority of the people on those lists were African-Americans. DBT employees didn't always appreciate the seriousness of their task. One e-mail between two such employees referred to the former prisoners they were enumerating as the "dirtbags of the nation." When DBT started to receive complaints, sometimes directly from voters who unjustly had had their right to vote challenged, product manager Marlene Thorogood seemed surprised. "There are just some people that feel when you mess with their 'right to vote' your [sic] messing with their life," she said in an e-mail.

And complaints did come in. More than a year before Election Day 2000, it was clear the lists contained thousands of names of Florida citizens who had never been convicted of felonies--or of any crime, for that matter. In some instances, the concentration of errors was absurd: Only seven people work in the Monroe County elections supervisors' office in Key West. One of those employees, along with the husband of another employee and the father of Supervisor Harry Sawyer, were all erroneously listed as having felony convictions. "And my father is a retired Sheriff's Department captain," said Sawyer. The lists were also absurdly sloppy: Some conviction dates were in the future. Angry voters by the thousands eventually complained to county supervisors of elections, who in turn complained to Tallahassee.

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