Florida says it won't strip 2,500 ex-felons of voting rights

The Associated Press
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. The Florida Division of Elections has done an about-face and said it will allow to vote almost 2,500 former felons whose restored voting rights had been threated with revocation.

Officials had originally said that state law required that former felons be d from the rolls because they had registered to vote before they received clemency.

But Secretary of State Glenda Hood backtracked on the issue Wednesday.

"Upon further review, the Department has determined that a felon granted clemency, regardless of when he or she registered to vote, should be eligible to vote," Hood said in a statement.

"It goes without saying that our guiding principle throughout this process will be to err on the side of the voter," Hood said.

The decision drew praise from civil rights groups, who argued that qualified voters could have been kicked off the rolls because of administrative errors and bureaucratic bungling.

Advocates with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Justice Institute, who threatened to sue unless the state switched course, also said that forcing voters to register again served no legitimate purpose and potentially violated the law.

"I think it was a needless impediment to the right to vote in Florida," said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida.

County elections supervisors had balked at the state's mandate requiring those voters to reregister.

Many considered it a paper-pushing technicality at a time when local election officials must investigate thousands of names, determine who is eligible to vote, and then notify by mail any suspected felons who have not had their civil rights restored.

"That's good news for the voters, and certainly it makes a lot of our tasks easier to follow," said Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan.

"We haven't even started the process because we haven't really had time to verify everything that's going on. We want to make sure people aren't disenfranchised."

Simon cautioned that the state list of 47,000 possible felons registered to vote must still be scrutinized for mistaken identities and other irregularities before elections supervisors begin removing people from the rolls.

Florida is one of seven states that does not automatically restore civil rights to felons after they have served their prison sentences.