Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program
Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons,
but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, from casting
ballots.
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By Gregory Palast
Dec. 4, 2000 | If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes
went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a
"scrub list" of 173,000 names knocked off the Florida voter registry by a
division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A
close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to
vote based on a flaw-ridden list of purported "felons" provided by a private
firm with tight Republican ties.
Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list
with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But
it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The
company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the
list -- the state of Texas.
Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter
rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered
in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have
been turned away at the polls.
Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to
"cleanse" voter rolls. Secretary of State Harris approved in 1998 the $4
million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta.
The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated
by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw
Miami's mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people
discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties
to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and
felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.
In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority population in
Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote because of a ban on
felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from other states, Florida
could, in the process, single out citizens who committed felons in other
states but, after serving their time or successfully petitioning the courts,
had their voting rights returned to them. According to Florida law, felons
can vote once their voting rights have been reinstated.
And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore: In
Florida, 93 percent of African Americans voted for the vice president.
In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file seemed
to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all.
But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names
from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort
at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their best to vet the
file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15 percent of names
incorrectly identified as felons.
News coverage has focused on some maverick Florida counties that decided not
to use the central voter file, essentially breaking the law and possibly
letting some ineligible felons vote. On Friday, the Miami Herald reported
that after researching voter records in 12 Florida counties -- but primarily
in Palm Beach and Duval counties, which didn't use the file -- it found that
more than 445 felons had apparently cast ballots in the presidential
election.
But Palm Beach and Duval weren't the only counties to dump the list after
questioning its accuracy. Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda
Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter
file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony,
she would not be allowed to vote.
Howell, who said she has never committed a felony, said the letter she
received in March shook her faith in the process. "It really is a mess," she
said.
"I was very upset," Howell said. "I know I'm not a felon." Though the mistake
did get corrected and law enforcement officials were quite apologetic, Howell
decided not to use the state list anymore because its "information is so
flawed." She's unsure of the number of warning letters that were sent out to
county residents when she first received the list in 1999, but she recalls
that there were many problems. "One day we would send a letter to have
someone taken off the rolls, and the next day, we would send one to put them
back on again," Howell said. "It makes you look like you must be a dummy."
Dixie and Washington counties also refused to use the scrub lists. Starlet
Cannon, Dixie's deputy assistant supervisor of elections, said, "I'm scared
to work with it because of lot of the information they have on there is not
accurate." Carol Griffin, supervisor of elections for Washington, said, "It
hasn't been accurate in the past, so we had no reason to suspect it was
accurate this year."
But if some counties refused to use the list altogether, others seemed to
embrace it all too enthusiastically. Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia
County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file
at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform
citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.
"When we get the con felon list, we automatically start going through our
rolls on the computer. If there's a name that says John Smith was convicted
of a felony, then we enter a notation on our computer that says convicted
felon -- we mark an "f" for felon -- and the date that we received it,"
Rosado said. "They're still on our computer, but they're on purge status,"
meaning they have been marked ineligible to vote.
"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon,"
Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show
up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon,
you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they
say 'Thank you' and walk away. They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't
know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of
being identified as felons.
Hillsborough County's elections supervisor, Pam Iorio, tried to make sure
that that the bugs in the system didn't keep anyone from voting. All 3,258
county residents who were identified as possible felons on the central voter
file sent by the state in June were sent a certified letter informing them
that their voting rights were in jeopardy. Of that number, 551 appealed their
status, and 245 of those appeals were successful. Some had been convicted of
a misdemeanor and not a felony, others were felons who had had their rights
restored and others were simply cases of mistaken identity.
An additional 279 were not close matches with names on the county's own voter
rolls and were not notified. Of the 3,258 names on the original list,
therefore, the county concluded that more than 15 percent were in error. If
that ratio held statewide, no fewer than 7,000 voters were incorrectly
targeted for removal from voting rosters.
Iorio says local officials did not get adequate preparation for purging
felons from their rolls. "We're not used to dealing with issues of criminal
justice or ascertaining who has a felony conviction," she said. Though the
central voter file was supposed to facilitate the process, it was often more
troublesome than the monthly circuit court lists that she had previously used
to clear her rolls of duplicate registrations, the deceased and convicted
felons. "The database from the state level is not always accurate," Iorio
said. As a consequence, her county did its best to notify citizens who were
on the list about their felony status. "We sent those individuals a certified
letter, we put an ad in a local newspaper and we held a public hearing. For
those who didn't respond to that, we sent out another letter by regular
mail," Iorio said. "That process lasted several months."
"We did run some number stats and the number of blacks [on the list] was
higher than expected for our population," says Chuck Smith, a statistician
for the county. Iorio acknowledged that African-Americans made up 54 percent
of the people on the original felons list, though they constitute only 11.6
percent of Hillsborough's voting population.
Smith added that the DBT computer program automatically transformed various
forms of a single name. In one case, a voter named "Christine" was identified
as a felon based on the conviction of a "Christopher" with the same last
name. Smith says ChoicePoint would not respond to queries about its
proprietary methods. Nor would the company provide additional verification
data to back its fingering certain individuals in the registry purge. One
supposed felon on the ChoicePoint list is a local judge.
While there was much about the lists that bothered Iorio, she felt she didn't
have a choice but to use them. And she's right. Section 98.0975 of the
Florida Constitution states:
"Upon receiving the list from the division, the supervisor must attempt to
verify the information provided. If the supervisor does not determine that
the information provided by the division is incorrect, the supervisor must
remove from the registration books by the next subsequent election the name
of any person who is deceased, convicted of a felony or adjudicated mentally
incapacitated with respect to voting."
But the counties have interpreted that law in different ways. Leon County
used the central voter file sent in January 2000 to clean up its voter rolls,
but set aside the one it received in July. According to Thomas James, the
information systems officer in the county election office, the list came too
late for the information to be processed.
According to Leon election supervisor Ion Sancho, "there have been some
problems" with the file. Using the information received in January, Sancho
sent 200 letters to county voters, by regular mail, telling them they had
been identified by the state as having committed a felony and would not be
allowed to vote. They were given 30 days to respond if there was an error.
"They had the burden of proof," he says. He says 20 people proved that they
did not belong on the list, and a handful of angry phone calls followed on
Election Day. "Some people threatened to sue us," he said, "but we haven't
had any lawyers calling yet."
In Orange County, officials also sent letters to those identified as felons
by the state, but they appear to have taken little care in their handling of
the list. "I have no idea," said June Condrun, Orange's deputy supervisor of
elections, when asked how many letters were sent out to voters. After a bit
more thought, Condrun responded that "several hundred" of the letters were
sent, but said she doesn't know how many people complained. Those who did
call, she said, were given the phone number of the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement so that they could appeal directly to it.
Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun
noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by
regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She
attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information
sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.
Miami-Dade County officials may have had similar trouble. Milton Collins,
assistant supervisor of elections, said he isn't comfortable estimating how
many accused felons were identified by the central voter file in his county.
He said he knows that about 6,000 were notified, by regular mail, about an
early list in 1999. Exactly how many were purged from the list? "I honestly
couldn't tell you," he said. According to Collins, the most recent list he
received from the state was one sent in January 2000, and the county applied
a "two-pass system": If the information on the state list seemed accurate
enough when comparing names with those on county voter lists, people were
classified as felons and were then sent warning letters. Those who seemed to
have only a partial match with the state data were granted "temporary
inactive status." Both groups of people were given 90 days to respond or have
their names struck from the rolls.
But Collins said the county has no figures for how many voters were able to
successfully appeal their designation as felons.
ChoicePoint spokesman Martin Fagan concedes his company's error in passing on
the bogus list from Texas. ("I guess that's a little bit embarrassing in
light of the election," he says.) He defends the company's overall
performance, however, dismissing the errors in 8,000 names as "a minor glitch
-- less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the electorate" (though the total
equals 15 times Gov. George W. Bush's claimed lead over Gore). But he added
that ChoicePoint is responsible only for turning over its raw list, which is
then up to Florida officials to test and correct.
Last year, DBT Online, with which ChoicePoint would soon merge, obtained an
unprecedented agreement from the state of Florida to "cleanse" registration
lists of ineligible voters -- using information gathering and matching
criteria it has refused to disclose, even to local election officials in
Florida.
Atlanta's ChoicePoint, a highflying dot-com specializing in sales of personal
information gleaned from its database of 4 billion public and not-so-public
records, has come under fire for misuse of private data from government
computers. In January, the state of Pennsylvania terminated a contract with
ChoicePoint after discovering the firm had sold citizens' personal profiles
to unauthorized individuals.
Fagan says many errors could have been eliminated by matching the Social
Security numbers of ex-felons on DBT lists to the Social Security numbers on
voter registries. However, Florida's counties have Social Security numbers on
only a fraction of their voter records. So with those two problems -- Social
Security numbers missing in both the DBT's records and the counties' records
-- that fail-safe check simply did not exist.
In its defense, the company proudly points to an award it received from Voter
Integrity Inc. on April 1 for "innovative excellence [in] cleansing" Florida
voter rolls. The conservative, nonprofit advocacy organization has campaigned
in parallel with the Republican Party against the 1993 motor voter law that
resulted in a nationwide increase in voter registration of 7 million, much of
it among minority voters. DBT Online partnered with Voter Integrity Inc.
three days later, setting up a program to let small counties "scrub" their
voting lists, too.
Florida is the only state in the nation to contract the first stage of
removal of voting rights to a private company. And ChoicePoint has big plans.
"Given the outcome of our work in Florida," says Fagan, "and with a new
president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."
Especially if that president is named "Bush." ChoicePoint's board and
executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken
Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee
for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham
Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate,
former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir. And Republican power
lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in
Washington. Just before his death in 1998, ChoicePoint founder Rick Rozar
donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.
(Alicia Montgomery, Daryl Lindsey and Anthony York contributed to this story.)
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About the writer
Gregory Palast writes the column "Inside Corporate America" for the Observer
of London and is the author of a forthcoming book, "Democratic Regulation."
