Talk:Florida Central Voter File/Archive1

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1 Scrub list, numbers

Scrub list, numbers

By all rights, it should be VV's responsibility to create this section, but I decided to take on this responsibility in order to speed the (due) process along. To start this discussion off, I looked for previous discussion on this topic, and found some atTalk:U.S._presidential_election,_2000/Archive_1. In this discussion, a source was stated: [1]. I have a friend who knows of some other relevant sources. It may take me some time to contact him, though. In any case, this is a start, and for the time being we can use whatever sources we have available now to make a paragraph that agrees with all the sources. Consider this a formal request for sources. (RfS). Also, can we contact the user who originally put this paragraph in? Kevin Baas | talk 22:37, 2004 Aug 16 (UTC)

And said source says in plain English that 57,700 is the number of felons excluded, not the number incorrectly excluded. I can't even believe you're serious about this; no one claims all the excluded felons were erroneous. If you find the person who originally put that number in, maybe you can go out drinking together and figure out a different lie to fabricate. V V 22:49, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Why are you doing this when you know the information you're putting back in is wrong, and obviously so? Drop the rhetoric about "maximum accuracy", because that's clearly not your intent. V V 22:52, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have fabricated no lies, I have complied with the good faith policy of Wikipedia, and defended the status quo from arbitrary changes. I did not write the disputed section, which is, indeed inaccurate, nor did I ever say that it was accurate. I said it was imprudent to change it until we compared sources. (if it ain't broke, don't fix it.) I do not deny the fact that the cited source says that 57,700 is the number of felons excluded, not the number incorrectly excluded. It appears that the version before your change was, indeed, inaccurate. However, it does not logically follow that your version is accurate. I accept the fact that the current version needs to be changed in order to comply with available sources of information. (I also think that the sources should be as direct and redundant as possible, to minimize noise. (distortion)) I reaffirm my intention, which the means that I have choosen, due process, exclusively provides for: fairness. Now we can construct, on this talk page, a new paragraph for the disputed section based exclusively on information provided by the sources that we agree on, and in proportion to said information's significance.

In light of the cited source, it is clear that neither the original nor the new version is accurate. What do you suggest? Kevin Baas | talk 23:29, 2004 Aug 16 (UTC)

I don't trust you at all. You're using this flimsy status quo talk (someone else added the falsehood, big deal) as an excuse to keep obvious misinformation on the page which is unfavorable to Bush. I already refuted this figure even back on Talk:George W. Bush, yet you continued to cite it and to try to put it in the Bush article. (I cited this extremist Gore site, which gives the usual figure of 1,100.) Now you're absurdly claiming that the "vast majority" of the felons were incorrectly excluded - wrong by a factor of 30 or so. Give me a break. You don't appear to have any interest in making an honest and accurate encyclopedia article, only in panning Bush with blatant falsehoods. I "suggest" that my version is perfectly accurate as I wrote it. V V 02:47, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Former BBC investigative reporter, Greg Palast, claims his investigation revealed 90.2 percent of those on the "scrub" list were in fact innocent. Fifty-four percent were black or Hispanic voters. [2] Wouldn't you call 90.2 percent a "vast majority?"--GD 08:00, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Apparently, the 'black or Hispanic voters' were mostly black, since it 'omits some Hispanics because of incompatible databases'. <http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/9173917.htm > Given that Florida Hispanics, (mostly Cuban), tend to vote Republican.... Gzuckier 17:18, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it omits ALL hispanic voters because of ONE database that they matched race with, with full and prior knowledge that that database listed hispanics as "white". This means that all persons listed as "hispanic" were removed by this match. If any one wants some sources for this information, I can find that for them. Kevin Baas | talk 18:37, 2004 Aug 21 (UTC)

Yes I would. However, I don't consider Palast's claims worth the paper (or disk memory) they're written on. The Gore people's figure of 1,100 came from research by the Palm Beach Post, a bit more credible. V V 09:05, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, it probably won't surprise you to learn I think Palast's claims are worth plenty. I don't know what "Gore people" you refer to nor where this "1,100" comes from. (link?) But anyways, you view the Palm Beach Post as more credible than the BBC?--GD 10:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Don't know where it comes from? Link? Just what were you replying to then? V V 10:45, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Please cite where the claim that many of the felonies were postdated came from. Much of the list was compiled from other states contributions and many of the errors were due to the fact it was in fact, ILLEGAL for them to base the scrub list on the race of the person, leading to confusion between people of the same name but different races. Rbsteffes 16:04, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

"Thomas Alvin Cooper, twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news." Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it."

-THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the 'felon' voter-purge was itself felonious

Harper's Magazine

Friday, March 1, 2002

Greg Palast

<http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1>

And here's a screenprint of the Excel 'database', predicting the good Mr. Cooper's future criminal activity, at the line with the 2 in the yellow circle.

<http://www.gregpalast.com/Harpers_img.htm > Gzuckier 16:47, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I've heard the first claim before too, which isn't surprising since typographical errors are common in gov't documents, but it may just be rumor. V V 16:39, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Similarly, re the scrub list, and appealing one's incorrect felon status 'after being notified':

'"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," [Volusia County Department of Elections spokeswoman Etta] 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.'

-Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program

By Gregory Palast

Dec. 4, 2000

<http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/print.html >

So that last deletion is correct.

And therefore, it gets restored. Well, let's put the above argument in and see how that floats.Gzuckier 16:26, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I love the concept that if you 'don't put up arguments' you're obviously guilty. That's the way they do it in Volusia County, eh? Gzuckier 18:03, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

List of sources

Some of those are from google. There are a whole lot of sources out there. We need to sort through the info in a representative sample. Kevin Baas | talk 21:10, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

We should stick to not flagrantly partisan sources. Palast, e.g., does not meet this standard. Very few sources back up your claim that the "vast majority" of the scrubbed felons were innocent. V V 03:04, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The Nation, The Guardian, and Salon are very partisan. Z Magazine is a joke which doesn't know it is. V V 03:06, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sources should not be discounted simply because they are partisan. That is ad hominem logical fallacy, and is not conducive to a thorough and impartial search for facts. Kevin Baas | talk 03:22, 2004 Aug 18 (UTC)

It's a matter of credibility. Call skepticism of the claims of fringe groups a fallacy if you want, it works for me. V V 03:29, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

All of the facts are corroborated by multiple independant sources, even the ones in the sources that you dispute. The information given in the sources are consistent with each other. The USCCR report alone corroborates every major fact. Representatives of ChoicePoint have even corroborated the information. Kevin Baas | talk 15:28, 2004 Aug 18 (UTC)

Statements from sources

(Iguana, Cupples)

"Thousands of Floridians' voting rights were threatened before the 1998 and 2000 elections. Threats stemmed from the state's voter-list-maintenance (purge) program, which was 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."

"In 2001, the US Civil Rights Commission reported that "Non-felons were removed from voter registration rolls based upon unreliable information..." 22 How did that happen? According to DBT's James Lee, of 173,000 names on a purge list, some 58,000 matched the names on DBT's possible-felon list. Of that 58,000, the Associated Press reported "about 12,000 people were listed as having felony convictions in Texas and other states even though many had been convicted of misdemeanors." Of that 12,000, DBT said that roughly 8000 falsely labeled "felons" came from Texas, and others came from Florida. This suggests a more-than-70% error rate. Gregory Palast, a columnist for London's Observer, found 714 errors similar errors involving people from Illinois and 990 from Ohio."

(Institute for Public Accuracy, Sam Husseini)

Palast states "Following the 2000 race, my investigative team at BBC Television discovered that tens of thousands of those purged by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush -- mostly black voters -- were utterly innocent."

Sancho states "When asked for assurances the list was 90 percent accurate, the minimum level local Supervisors of Elections requested for such a list, we were told that it was better than the 2000 list -- with no data to support its accuracy."

(The Nation, Lantigua)

"In all, some 200,000 Floridians were either not permitted to vote in the November 7 election on questionable or possibly illegal grounds, or saw their ballots discarded and not counted. A large and disproportionate number were black."

"According to exit polls, 65 percent more black voters went to the polls in Florida in 2000 than in the 1996 election, and of the votes that were counted, blacks went at least 9 to 1 for Democrat Al Gore."

"Thus the stage was set for Election Day 2000, when the black vote went from 10 percent of the state total in 1996 to 16 percent, according to exit polls."

"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 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."

"In May 2000 the process went totally awry. Some 8,000 names, mostly those of former Texas prisoners who were included on a DBT list, turned out never to have been convicted of more than a misdemeanor. The new elections director, Clay Roberts, later claimed the error had been caught in time and that none of those individuals lost their rights. But Mitchell admitted that other lists of alleged felons supplied to DBT by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement also contained errors, among them the inclusion of many people convicted only of misdemeanors. "

"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." "

"The lists targeted black voters in extremely disproportionate numbers. In Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, where only 15 percent of voters are black, 54 percent of the names on the purge list were African-Americans. In Miami-Dade, where blacks make up 20 percent of the population, a list of 5,762 people contained the names of 3,794 blacks, or 66 percent. In Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, the state capital, 29 percent of the people are black, but 55 percent of the purge list names were African-Americans. "

"according to Roxby, the Office of Executive Clemency in Tallahassee had a backlog of six months to a year. "I'd say I had about sixty such people come to me over the past three years, and only about three of them ever got their clemency," said Roxby. "Seven or eight out of ten were blacks." Other supervisors reported similar instances of former prisoners who had been active voters for years but who were discouraged by the suddenly enforced clemency process. State law enforcement officials later said that based on past voting records, only about 10 percent of former prisoners might be expected to vote. In a highly contested election such as the one in 2000, that could be expected to increase. But even if one uses the state's own figures, out of 187,000 former prisoners who had completed parole but had not received clemency, close to 20,000 might have voted if they'd been permitted. State statisticians say, based on race and economic factors, that group could be expected to vote Democratic 75 percent of the time. "

(whew, that was a long one!)

(Creative Loafing, Wall)

"As CL discovered during a look at Georgia's criminal record system last year, local law enforcement agencies vary widely in their adherence to approved criminal record input procedures, and mistakes -- including innocent people being locked up or fired -- do happen. On a national level, although the FBI declines to reveal a "standard" margin of error, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said the national figure is about 2 percent. "

(The Nation, Palast)

"People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number "clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000," says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University. Manza estimates that 80 percent arrive with voting rights intact, which they do not forfeit by relocating to Florida.

Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor's office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, with the aid of a Republican-tied database firm, Harris's office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries.

After reviewing The Nation's findings, voter demographics authority David Bositis concluded that the purge-and-block program was "a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, notes that based on nationwide conviction rates, African-Americans would account for 46 percent of the ex-felon group wrongly disfranchised. Corroborating Bositis's estimate, the Hillsborough County elections supervisor found that 54 percent of the voters targeted by the "scrub" are African-American, in a county where blacks make up 11 percent of the voting population. "

"Over the past two years, with Republicans in charge of both the governorship and the secretary of state's office, now under Harris, the felon purge has accelerated. In May 2000, using a list provided by DBT, Harris's office ordered counties to purge 8,000 Florida voters who had committed felonies in Texas. In fact, none of the group were charged with anything more than misdemeanors, a mistake caught but never fully reversed. ChoicePoint DBT and Harris then sent out "corrected" lists, including the names of 437 voters who indeed had committed felonies in Texas. But this list too was in error, since a Texas law enacted in 1997 permits felons to vote after doing their time. In this case there was no attempt at all to correct the error.

The wrongful purge of the Texas convicts was no one-of-a-kind mishap. The secretary of state's office acknowledges that it also ordered the removal of 714 names of Illinois felons and 990 from Ohio--states that permit the vote even to those on probation or parole. According to Florida's own laws, not a single person arriving in the state from Ohio or Illinois should have been removed. Altogether DBT tagged for the scrub nearly 3,000 felons who came from at least eight states that automatically restore voting rights and who therefore arrived in Florida with full citizenship. "

(The Gaurdian, Burkeman & Tuckman)

No relevant figures.

(The Salon, York)

"Dec. 8, 2000 | Behind all the squabbling about dimpled chads and manual recounts, the Florida election debacle has revived debate on an old partisan controversy: when and how to purge voter rolls, to reduce fraud and make sure the ineligible don't vote.

In Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris' office removed 173,000 names from state voter rolls this year, based on a list of supposedly ineligible voters provided by a private firm with strong Republican ties. A Salon examination of the list revealed that thousands of voters may have been mistakenly deemed ineligible to vote by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, Florida's private contractor.

ChoicePoint's list included 8,000 people the group said were convicted of felonies and therefore ineligible to vote. But as it turned out, those people had only been convicted of misdemeanors, and should have been able to cast votes in Florida. The mistakes on that list, Democrats argue, disproportionately penalized African-American voters in Florida, more than 90 percent of whom voted for Al Gore."

(The Salon, 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 targeted to be 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 that included 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.The state signed in 1998 a $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. "

"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. "

(Harper's Magazine, Palast)

"Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) "

(WFC, Palast)

"Go back to the case of Thomas Cooper, Criminal of the Future. I counted 325 of these time-traveling bandits on one of Harris’s scrub lists. Clerical error? I dug back into the computers, the e-mail traffic in the Florida Department of Elections, part of the secretary of state’s office. And sure enough, the office clerks were screaming: They’d found a boatload like Mr. Cooper on the purge list, convicted in the future, in the next century, in the next millennium. "

"The Florida purge lists have over 4,000 blank conviction dates. "

"Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. "

"...That was impressive. And indeed, every database expert told me (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. But over the ensuing weeks and months I discovered:

ChoicePoint used virtually no Social Security numbers for the Florida felon purge;
of its 1,200 databases with which to “check the accuracy of the data,” ChoicePoint used exactly none for cross-checking;
as to the necessary verification of address history of the 66,000 named “potential felons,” ChoicePoint performed this check in exactly zero cases.

There was, then, not a chance in hell that the list was “85 percent correct.”

The statewide list of felons is “homogeneous” as to its accuracy. Leon County provides us with a sample large enough to give us a “confidence interval” of 4.87 at a “confidence level” of 99 percent. Are you following me, class? In other words, we can be 99 percent certain that at least 90.2 percent of the names on the Florida list are not felons -- 52,000 wrongly tagged for removal. "

"Based on this new evidence, BBC broadcast that the faux felon purge and related voting games cost Al Gore at least 22,000 votes in Florida -- forty times Bush’s margin of victory as certifiedby Harris. Quibble with that estimate, tweak it as you will, we now knew the rightful winner of the election. Or at least the British public knew."

"On April 17 ChoicePoint VP James Lee opened his testimony before the McKinney panel with notice that, despite its prior boast, the firm was getting out of the voter purge business. Thenthe company man, in highly technical, guarded language, effectively confessed to the whole game. Lee fingered the state. Lee said that, for example, the state had given DBT the trulyinsane directive to add to the purge list people who matched 90 percent of a last name -- if Anderson committed a crime, Andersen lost his vote. DBT objected, knowing this would sweepin a huge number of innocents. The state then went further and ordered DBT to shift to an 80 percent match. It was programmed-in inaccuracy. Names were reversed—felon Thomas Clarencecould knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. He confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped. Then, 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 countyor not a felon would be included on the list. Likewise, DBT made suggestions to reduce the numbers of eligible voters included on the list.”"

Kevin Baas | talk 01:13, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)

Aggregating and organizing facts

Origin of list

When I looked into state files, I discovered that ChoicePoint’s DBT was not the first contractor on the job. In 1998, this firstfirm, Professional Service Inc., charged $5,700 for the job. A year later, the Florida Department of Elections terminated their contract, then gave the job to DBT for a first-year fee of $2,317,800 -- no bidding! Then I found out that indeed there had been an open bid for the job. However, when the offers were unsealed, DBT’s was the costliest -- several thousand percent over competitors. The state ignored the bids and grabbed for DBT, in the end signing a deal for more than DBT’s original astronomical bid. Hmm.

When I contacted database industry experts about the fee paid DBT by Florida their eyes popped out -- “Wow!” “Jeez!” “Scandalous!” The charge of twenty-seven cents per record was easily ten times the industry norm.

List size, content, purpose

Thousands of Floridians' voting rights were threatened before the 1998 and 2000 elections. Threats stemmed from the state's voter-list-maintenance (purge) program, which was 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."

In November of that year, the state contracted with Database Technologies (DBT) of Boca Raton, which has since merged with ChoicePoint of Atlanta.

The first list DBT Online provided to the Division of Elections in April 2000 contained the names of 181,157 possible duplicate registrants, deceased persons, and felons without civil rights restoration.[120] Approximately 65,776 of those included on the first list were identified as felons.[121]

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.

In May 2000 the process went totally awry. Some 8,000 names, mostly those of former Texas prisoners who were included on a DBT list, turned out never to have been convicted of more than a misdemeanor. The new elections director, Clay Roberts, later claimed the error had been caught in time and that none of those individuals lost their rights. But Mitchell admitted that other lists of alleged felons supplied to DBT by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement also contained errors, among them the inclusion of many people convicted only of misdemeanors.

In May 2000, DBT discovered that approximately 8,000 names were erroneously placed on the exclusion list.[122] Later in the month, DBT Online provided a revised list to the Division of Elections containing a total of 173,127 possible duplicate registrants, deceased persons, and felons without civil rights restoration.[123] Of those included on the “corrected list,” 57,746 were identified as felons.[124]

The documents received by the Commission from DBT Online indicate that the process for clemency verification for purported felons convicted in a court other than a Florida state court consisted of faxing a list of possible felons to the appropriate state agency. For example, the following state agencies responded to DBT Online’s clemency inquiries:

State of Washington Department of Corrections;[125]
Kentucky Secretary of State’s Office;[126]
New Jersey Extradition Secretary, Office of the Governor;[127] and
Virginia Secretary of State’s Office.[128]

List demographics

The lists targeted black voters in extremely disproportionate numbers. In Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, where only 15 percent of voters are black, 54 percent of the names on the purge list were African-Americans. In Miami-Dade, where blacks make up 20 percent of the population, a list of 5,762 people contained the names of 3,794 blacks, or 66 percent. In Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, the state capital, 29 percent of the people are black, but 55 percent of the purge list names were African-Americans.

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters.

List accuracy

conviction dates

The Florida purge lists have over 4,000 blank conviction dates.

I counted 325 of these time-traveling bandits on one of Harris’s scrub lists. Clerical error? I dug back into the computers, the e-mail traffic in the Florida Department of Elections, part of the secretary of state’s office. And sure enough, the office clerks were screaming: They’d found a boatload like Mr. Cooper on the purge list, convicted in the future, in the next century, in the next millennium.

out-of-state ex-felons

Altogether DBT tagged for the scrub nearly 3,000 felons who came from at least eight states that automatically restore voting rights and who therefore arrived in Florida with full citizenship.

accuracy assurance

every database expert told me (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. But over the ensuing weeks and months I discovered: ChoicePoint used virtually no Social Security numbers for the Florida felon purge; of its 1,200 databases with which to “check the accuracy of the data,” ChoicePoint used exactly none for cross-checking; as to the necessary verification of address history of the 66,000 named “potential felons,” ChoicePoint performed this check in exactly zero cases. There was, then, not a chance in hell that the list was “85 percent correct.”

comparison to norm

As CL discovered during a look at Georgia's criminal record system last year, local law enforcement agencies vary widely in their adherence to approved criminal record input procedures, and mistakes -- including innocent people being locked up or fired -- do happen. On a national level, although the FBI declines to reveal a "standard" margin of error, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said the national figure is about 2 percent.

Orders given

Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls.

Reception of list

When asked for assurances the list was 90 percent accurate, the minimum level local Supervisors of Elections requested for such a list, we were told that it was better than the 2000 list -- with no data to support its accuracy

Exit polls, voting demographics

According to exit polls, 65 percent more black voters went to the polls in Florida in 2000 than in the 1996 election" "Thus the stage was set for Election Day 2000, when the black vote went from 10 percent of the state total in 1996 to 16 percent, according to exit polls.

appeals

Leon

One county, Leon (Tallahassee), carried out the purge as the law required. But with doubts in the minds of their in-house experts, the county did the hard work of checking each name, oneby one, to verify independently that the 694 named felons in Tallahassee were, in fact, ineligible voters. They could verify only 34 names -- a 95 percent error rate. That is killer information. In another life, decades ago, I taught “Collection and Use of Economic and Statistical Data” at Indiana University. Here’s a quicky statistics lesson: The statewide list of felons is “homogeneous” as to its accuracy. Leon County provides us with a sample large enough to give us a “confidence interval” of 4.87 at a “confidence level” of 99 percent. Are you following me, class? In other words, we can be 99 percent certain that at least 90.2 percent of the names on the Florida list are not felons -- 52,000 wrongly tagged for removal. "

Miami-Dade

In his testimony before the Governor’s Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards and Technology, Clay Roberts explained there was no clear statutory guideline on the manner in which the supervisors of elections were expected to verify the information supplied by DBT Online; as a result, each county supervisor established his or her own policy.[141] The lack of uniformity among the counties regarding felon list verification processes is evidenced in letters drafted by Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections David Leahy and Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho.[142] Mr. Leahy’s form letter to alleged felons states in pertinent part:

According to information received from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, you have a felony conviction and have not had your civil rights restored. Therefore, your name will be removed from the voter registration rolls thirty (30) days from the date of this letter unless information is received that you have not been convicted of a felony or have had your civil rights restored.[143]

The Miami-Dade letter further instructs the alleged felon to complete a form and provides three addresses to which he or she may forward the information.[144] If an alleged felon had, in fact, been convicted of a felony and did not have his or her civil rights restored, the letter instructs him or her to obtain a clemency application form from the Office of Executive Clemency and to contact the office of the supervisor of elections to obtain voter registration information once restoration has been granted.[145] While Mr. Leahy’s letter appears to place confidence in the veracity of the DBT Online felon list, the Leon County form letter to alleged felons demonstrates an understanding of the lists’ inclusion of “false positives.” Mr. Sancho’s form letter provides in pertinent part:

Your name has been submitted to our office by the Florida Division of Elections on a list of voters who have allegedly been convicted of a felony, but not had their right to vote restored. We do not know if this list is accurate. Our office is required to remove you from the voter rolls if you have been convicted of a felony and your right to vote has not been restored.

If you have never been convicted of a felony, we want to help you clear this up.[146]

The letter instructs the alleged felon to fill out a form and return it to the supervisor of elections office within 30 days or be removed from the voter list.[147] The form requests the alleged felon to self-identify as one of the following: never convicted of a felony; convicted of a felony, but civil rights have been restored and eligible to vote; or convicted of a felony, but civil rights have not been restored.[148]

Mr. Sancho’s letter suggests a partnership between his office and the alleged felon to “clear up” any confusion regarding his or her voting status; whereas Mr. Leahy’s letter requires the alleged felon prove his or her eligibility status. The simplicity of Mr. Sancho’s letter may have even been preferred by DBT Online. When asked about the language used in Mr. Leahy’s letter, Mr. Bruder responded:

Are you asking me should he have drafted this letter to say “you possibly have a felon conviction and we’re trying to verify that”? I would have wrote it that way.[149]

Patricia M. Hollarn, the 1998 president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections and then supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County, drafted a letter to alleged felons that read in pertinent part:

We have received a list of convicted felons on which your name appears. This list was sent to us by the state and we have been informed it may contain errors. We are asking our voters whose names appear on the list to please assist us with verification so that we don’t incorrectly remove any names from our rolls.[150]

Ms. Hollarn’s letter then asks the recipient to identify him or herself in one of three categories. The first category is that the individual was convicted of a felony with his or her civil rights restored. The recipient is informed that his or her civil rights restoration status will be confirmed with the Office of Executive Clemency.[151] If the recipient self-identifies in the second category as a convicted felon without civil rights restoration, then Ms. Hollarn’s office promises to assist in the paperwork. The third category is that the individual has never been convicted of a felony. Ms. Hollarn offers an apology to this recipient. Ms. Hollarn’s letter enclosed a prepaid self-addressed envelope with each letter.[152]

In a letter transmitted by facsimile to the Division of Elections from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on August 14, 1998, the instruction on voter eligibility verification through fingerprints was clarified. A form provided by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement required that both the supervisor of elections and the voter complete separate sections of the form requesting the voter’s complete name, date of birth, gender, and social security number.[153] The voter must also authorize that the information be used to “confirm or deny a felony conviction” and be fingerprinted in the space provided on the form.[154]

The supervisors of elections were not required to report to the Division of Elections if they removed someone based on the possible felon list.[155] Once an individual was identified as a “possible” felon by DBT Online, the supervisors of elections sent a letter to the voter at his or her registration address.[156] Some supervisors sent their letters by certified mail, while others did not.[157] If the voter did not respond to the letter, some supervisors may have attempted to contact the voter again, while others did not.[158]

Hillsborough

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.

But were the "verified" felons actually felons?

County supervisors and other local officials noted their frustration with the election problems that resulted from the false positives on the felon list. Linda Howell, Madison County supervisor of elections, testified that she found the disenfranchisement of felons “most distressing.”[161] Yet, elected African American officials asserted that by the time the error was caught, it was too late for the counties to correct it and that the first time any of these voters realized they had been removed from the voter rolls was on Election Day.[162] Ms. Howell testified:

There needs to be something done with the law with regard to a person being able to get their civil rights restored. It’s a very different thing in Florida to have that done. Some people—it’s been 20 years and they still haven’t gotten their civil rights. Sometimes that is because they don’t even know they are supposed to do something. You have to apply to have your civil rights restored. If I applied today, it would take me from six months to a year to get them restored. So that is an area that has been very distressful for us in our county.[163]

Ms. Howell stated that the first list her office received from the Division of Elections was in 1998 and had no indication of the origin of the information.[164] Floridians who had been convicted of a misdemeanor with an adjudication withheld or people who had received clemency or were pardoned were included in the first Madison County list.[165] Ms. Howell recalled that one person on the list received a pardon in 1967. “The first list was so inaccurate that you were almost afraid to do anything with it,” she said.[166]

Ms. Howell attempted to verify the names on the list by requesting felony conviction confirmation with the Madison County clerk’s office and sending letters to the alleged felons on the list.[167] The letters sent to the alleged felons included a voter verification form that is sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.[168] The FDLE would then verify the felon status of the voter and send the alleged felon a letter including its determination. A fingerprint card to determine whether he or she was the same person listed as a felon was sent along with the letter when appropriate.[169] The alleged felons to whom Ms. Howell sent letters had 30 days to respond.[170] Ms. Howell stated she removed some names of people who appeared on that first list from the Madison County voter file. Ms. Howell received a second list in June 2000, which had only two names, but she chose not to use that list.[171]

Even Ms. Howell, who is not a convicted felon, erroneously received a form letter referencing a prior felony conviction from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.[172] The letter, dated March 27, 2000, states in pertinent part:

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.[173]

The form letter informs the recipient that he or she may obtain and review a copy of his or her personal criminal history at no charge.[174] If the recipient obtained a Certificate of Restoration of Civil Rights, the letter instructs the individual to forward a copy of the certificate to the county supervisor of elections and the FDLE.[175]

At the Commission hearing in Tallahassee, Ms. Howell recalled her response to receiving the letter:

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. Now the thing that really upset me was that . . . they were not taking their job seriously. The law said that they had to verify this, but they were not taking it seriously. And that could destroy a person’s life. You get that on your record, how do you get it off?[176]

Ms. Howell later learned she was never on the felon list provided by the Division of Elections or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.[177]

Prosecution, voting rights

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."

On April 17 ChoicePoint VP James Lee opened his testimony before the McKinney panel with notice that, despite its prior boast, the firm was getting out of the voter purge business. Thenthe company man, in highly technical, guarded language, effectively confessed to the whole game. Lee fingered the state. Lee said that, for example, the state had given DBT the trulyinsane directive to add to the purge list people who matched 90 percent of a last name -- if Anderson committed a crime, Andersen lost his vote. DBT objected, knowing this would sweepin a huge number of innocents. The state then went further and ordered DBT to shift to an 80 percent match. It was programmed-in inaccuracy. Names were reversed—felon Thomas Clarencecould knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. He confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped. Then, nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list.

Correct the list? Remove those “not a felon”? The state, says DBT, told the company, Forget about it.

The “CONFIDENTIAL” page, obviously not meant to see the light of day, said that DBT would be paid $2.3 million for theirlists and “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.”No wonder Roberts did a runner. He and Harris had testified to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission -- under oath -- that verification of the voter purge list was left completely up to the county elections supervisors, not to the state or the contractor, ChoicePoint DBT.

It was the requirement to verify the accuracy of the purge list that justified ChoicePoint’s selection for the job as well as their astonishingly high fee. Good evening, Mr. Smith. Are you the same Mr. John Smith that served hard time in New York in 1991? Expensive though that is to repeat thousands of times, it is necessary when civil rights are at stake. Yet DBT seemed to have found a way to cut the cost of this procedure: not doing it. There is no record of DBT having made extensive verification calls.

Kevin Baas | talk 01:13, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)

Compressing the info.

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

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 Proffesional Service Inc.'s contract. DBT Online later merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta.

Names were ordered by State to include legal voters

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 went further and ordered DBT to shift to an 80 percent match. Names were also reversed — felon Thomas Clarence could knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. He confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped. Then, 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. Likewise, 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 list

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.

Problems with list at election time

Specific problems

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

There was no accuracy assurance

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”

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.

Names were ordered by State 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.

Elecion Law Violations

Allegations, Lawsuits

People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen (1 p.25), 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.

In June, 2001, The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report and statements [3]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 initate the litigation process" or "should immediately initate the litigation process"

(See also [4])

On Feburary, 2002, the NAACP and four other groups filed suit against Harris (NAACP v. Harris), a former state election chief, and the county elections supervisor. [5] 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. [6] [7]

On May 21st, 2002, the U.S. Justice Department 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 immediate settlement. [8] [9]

Demographics of list

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

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."

However, these numbers cannot be trusted to be accurate, because even after appealing, some people that were not convicted felons were still judged to be convicted felons. 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, erreneously recieved 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."

Kevin Baas | talk 01:13, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)

Side issues (not relating to 57,746 DBT/Choicepoint purge list)

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.

People from other states who have arrived in Florida with a felony conviction in their past number “clearly over 50,000 and likely over 100,000,” says criminal demographics expert Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University, are no fewer than 40,000 reformed felons eligible to vote in Florida.

Nevertheless, agencies controlled by Harris and Bush ordered county officials to reject attempts by these eligible voters to register, while, publicly, the governor’s office states that it adheres to court rulings not to obstruct these ex-offenders in the exercise of their civil rights. Further, Harris’s office used sophisticated computer programs to hunt those felons eligible to vote and ordered them thrown off the voter registries.

Kevin Baas | talk 01:13, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)

Categories: Talk archives

Talk:Florida Central Voter File/Archive1

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Compressing the info.

Side issues (not relating to 57,746 DBT/Choicepoint purge list)

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