Origin of the Central Voter File

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls. 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.

The state's voter-list-maintenance program is supposed to remove ineligible voters from the Central Voter File:

• Those who had died
• Those who had moved
• Those who had been convicted of felonies and had not had their civil rights restored

Those who are deemed mentally incompetent are not included on the list, although they are legally considered to be ineligible voters.

In 1998, the first firm employed to these ends, Professional Service Inc., charged $5,700 for the job. There was an open bid for the job. DBT Online’s bid was the highest, several thousand percent over competitors. The state gave the job to DBT for a first year fee of $2,317,800. In the state files, on the DBT bid, is a handwritten notation, “don’t need,” next to the listing of verification databases, though this work was included in the price. In 1998, the state signed a deal with DBT for $4 million. In 1999, the Florida Department of Elections terminated Professional Service Inc.'s contract. DBT Online later merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta.

Names were ordered by the Florida state government to be removed from voter rolls

Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- distributed these scrub lists to counties and ordered the listed 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters.

2000 Florida Election Controversy

Names were ordered by the Florida state government to include legal voters

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 to 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."

On April 17, 2001 ChoicePoint VP James Lee testified, before the McKinney panel, that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched 90 percent of a last name. DBT objected, knowing this would sweep in a huge number of innocents. The state then ordered DBT to shift to an 80 percent match. Names were also reversed — felon Thomas Clarence could knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. James Lee confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped, adding that 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.” To this suggestion, the State, says DBT, told the company, "Forget about it."

"The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant ... they told them what would happen," ChoicePoint's Lee said. "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."[1]

The list

Florida has had to correct its felon list five times since 1998 due to 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.

List demographics

According to the Palm Beach Post, blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, though they make up only about 11% of Florida's voters.[2]

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.

Breakdown of the distribution for 3 major counties:

• Hillsbourgh county, 15%?11% voters are Black, 54% names on list were Black.
• Miami-Dade, 20% voters are Black, 66% names on list were Black (3,794)
• Leon County, 29% voters are Black, 55% names on list were Black

None of the names on the list were Hispanic.

See also: the demographics of Florida.

Problems with list at election time

At the time of election, the list contained an inordinate number of "false positives" - people identified as felons who were not actually felons.

Specific problems

There were many specific problems with the list, including:

• over 4,000 blank conviction dates.
• 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 (who, according to a 1998 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeals, cannot then be ruled ineligible by another state). DBT had decided in March of 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.
• all Hispanics had been removed.
• names listed who had been convicted of misdemeanors only, not felonies, and therefore should not have been ineligible 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).

There was no accuracy assurance

A database company like DBT/Choicepoint is typically hired for their accuracy assurance expertise, with the sole purpose of improving the accuracy of the database, primarily through database cross-checking.

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

Greg Palast reports that every database expert told him (including DBT’s vice president), if you want 85 percent accuracy or better, you will need at least these three things:

• Social Security numbers
• address history and
• a check against other databases.

Of these accuracy assurance methods, ChoicePoint:

• used virtually no Social Security numbers
• did not check a single address history
• used no database cross-checking, although it had 1,200 databases with which to “check the accuracy of the data”

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. [3]

Mark Hull, the former senior programmer for CDB Infotek, a Choice-Point company, said the state and ChoicePoint could have chosen criteria that would have brought down the number of “false positives” to less than a fragment of 1 percent.

List accuracy

The only reliable measure of accuracy we have 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%. Statistically, this sample tells us that there is a more than 99% chance that at least 90.2% of those listed as felons in the 2000 Florida Central Voter File were, in fact, eligible voters.

The Palm Beach Post newspaper reported that

"a Palm Beach Post computer 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." [4]

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, and 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."

Appeals

In time, an appeals process was instituted, but in some cases it required ordinary citizens to be fingerprinted in order to prove they weren't the felons they were accused of being. In the end, out of 4,847 people who appealed, 2,430 were judged not to be convicted felons. As Civil Rights Commission attorney Bernard Quarterman put it during testimony in Miami on February 16, "They were guilty until proven innocent." At least 108 legitimate voters were not purged from the list until after the election.

Some voters on the list did not receive advance notice that they were ineligible to vote until they appeared at the polls. Some had even received new voters cards in the mail.

Election Law Violations, Allegations, Lawsuits

The severe problems with the list, and the process by which it was manufactured and deployed, as well as other issues related to the 2000 election controversy in Florida, became the subject of much criticism and allegations of fraud, which resulted in investigations, litigation, and reform measures.

Phyllis Hampton, general counsel of the Florida Elections Commission, testified that her office could investigate the wrongful removal of a Floridian from the voter rolls if there was evidence of a willful violation. Ms. Hampton stated:

"If we had a sworn complaint, which on its face was legally sufficient, we would proceed and look into the matter and see. But one of the requirements to find a violation is that there is willfulness. So if you had a person who had accidentally been removed during the purging of the election records, that would not be a willful violation. You would have to have someone who was deliberately removing people when they should not be removed, for there to be an election law violation."

• People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen have argued that Florida was in violation of
  • the National Voter Registration Act of 1993

by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states), to request clemency and a restoration of their rights.

• On February 17th, 2001, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, in collaboration with Florida Legal Services and the Florida Justice Institute , launched the Equal Voting Rights Project .[5]

• In June, 2001, The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report and statements [6]arguing that Florida was, on numerous counts, in violation of the
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965 and recommending:
    • On 1 count that "The U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws, practices, and procedures..."
    • On 1 count that "The U.S. Department of Justice should initiate the litigation process against the governor..."
    • On 1 count that "The U.S. Department of Justice should initiate the litigation process against the secretary of State..."
    • On 12 counts that "The U.S. Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against state election officials..."
    • ...And so on, totaling 20 recommendations involving the phrase "should initiate the litigation process" or "should immediately initiate the litigation process"

(See also [7])

• On February, 2002, the NAACP and four other groups filed suit against Harris (NAACP v. Harris ), a former state election chief, and the county elections supervisor. [8] The lawsuit cites the state, several counties and the contractor over procedures for voter registration, voter lists and balloting. The suit charges that Black voters were disenfranchised during the 2000 presidential election, and argued that Florida was in violation of:
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965
  • US Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment

A settlement was reached in NAACP's favor. [9] [10]

• On May 21st, 2002, the U.S. Justice Department, headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, disclosed that it will sue three Florida counties (Miami-Dade, Orange, and Osceola) for alleged voting rights violations not relating to the lists. They said they expected the charges to be uncontested, and for a settlement to be reached immediately. The counties released copies of the Justice Department's letters citing its intention to sue over language issues, including a charge that the lack of "bilingual poll workers" in Osceola Country resulted in the turning away of many Hispanic residents who mistakenly voted in the wrong precinct. [11] [12]

In August, 2002, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a briefing summary regarding the progress of voting rights in Florida.

Resources

Major sources

• (U.S. Federal Government, U.S. Commision on Civil Rights)
• (Greg Palast)
• (The Nation, Lantigua)
• (WFC, Palast)
• (List of sources)
• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Minor sources

• (1997 statement by Palm Beach election supervisor, re:HR 1428)
• (Institute for Public Accuracy, Sam Husseini)
• (Iguana, Cupples)
• (Wisconsin State Legislature)
• (ZMag, Schechter)
• (Harper's Magazine, Palast)
• (The Miami Herald, account required)
• (The Salon, Palast)
• (The Salon, York)
• (The Gaurdian, Burkeman & Tuckman)
• (The Nation, Palast)
• (Creative Loafing, Wall)