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N.A.A.C.P. Sues Florida for Voting Fraud

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME
How the felon voter-purge was itself felonious
by Greg Palast
Copyright © Harper's Magazine 03/01/2002
Available Free of Charge at
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the
Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the
ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some
Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. 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.) A portion of the list, which was
compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here;
DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million
for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same
service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more
voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

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. Most of
the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in
Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate
and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of
ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any
further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by
the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address
histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state
declined the cross-checks. In Harris‚s elections office files, next to
DBT‚s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note:
DON'T NEED.

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), 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.

Rev. Willie Dixon (3), seventy, was guilty of a crime in his youth; but
one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned
Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other
excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after
finding that African-Americansòwho account for 13 percent of Florida's
electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions òwere four times as
likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's
methodology. After the election, Harris and her elections chief Clay
Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was solely the work
of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and
Confidential) holds DBT responsible for manual verification using
telephone calls.in fact, with the state‚s blessing, DBT did not call a
single felon. When I asked Roberts about the contract during an interview
for BBC television, Roberts ripped of his microphone, ran into his office,
locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.

Johnny Jackson Jr. (4), thirty-two, has never been to Texas, and his
mother swears he never had the middle name „Fitzgerald.‰ Neither is there
evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of Texas, has ever left the
Lone Star State. But even if they were the same man, removing him from
Florida‚s voter rolls is an unconstitutional act. Texas is among the
thirty five states where ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full
faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke
any civil rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in
fact, the Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so,
just nine months before the voter purge. Nevertheless, at least 2,873
voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 2000
letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office. On February 23,
2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights began investigating
the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter allowing these persons to
vote; no copies of the earlier letter could be found in the clemency
office or on its computers.

Wallace McDonald (5), sixty-four, lost his right to vote in 2000, though
his sole run-in with the law was a misdemeanor in 1959. (He fell asleep on
a bus-stop bench.) Of the "matches' on these lists, the civil-rights
commission estimated that at least 14 percent - or 8,000 voters, nearly 15
times Bush's official margin of victory - were false. DBT claims it warned
officials "a significant number of people who were not a felon would be
included on the list"; but the state, the company now says, "wanted there
to be more names than were actually verified." Last May, Florida's
legislature barred Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list
and ordered her to seek guidance from county elections officials. In
defiance, Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in
time for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.

Special thanks to Fredda Weinberg for cracking the Florida computer files
and crunching the numbers as well as to all the volunteer researchers who
contributed to this investigative effort.
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Regards,
JP

"What is the problem, oh Babylon?
Lack of information...mon,
That's all."

michaelm
art director