1,249 felons waiting to vote

BY DAVID KIDWELL AND DEBBIE CENZIPER

dkidwell@herald.com

 

As many as 1,249 Floridians convicted of crimes in other states could be mistakenly barred from voting in November, despite a 2-year-old agreement by Florida election officials that was meant to return them to the rolls.

The reason: lost paperwork and slow-moving bureaucracies.

All 1,249 were convicted in states that automatically restore voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences.

Administrators of the Florida Division of Elections say they have worked hard to repair mistakes from the 2000 election, and they have already reinstated more than 1,700 out-of-state felons. But efforts to restore the rest have been stymied by other states slow to respond to requests for information, records show.

''We have been very diligent, and we've worked very hard to get this done,'' said Dawn Roberts, director of the Division of Elections. ``We've been writing and calling every one of those states. It is not an easy task, and we have acted in good faith all along.''

But civil rights lawyers who extracted the agreement from the state as part of a legal settlement two years ago say election officials are plodding unnecessarily, and the names should be restored automatically.

SIMPLE CALL

''We thought they would call the states in question, verify they indeed were automatic restoration states and give people their rights back,'' said Elliot Mincberg, attorney for the civil rights foundation People for the American Way.

''Instead, they decided that each and every name must be researched by the other state,'' he said. ``In some cases, that's not happening. Again, the state continues to err on the side of exclusion instead of on the side of the voter.''

This latest voting controversy comes amid a torrent of criticism over the state's efforts to remove suspected ineligible felons from the voter rolls.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Glenda Hood ordered her office's most recent effort to compile such a list scrapped less than two weeks after a judge ordered it made public. Newspapers examining the list found gaping errors.

The Herald reported that 2,119 voters remained on the list even though they received clemency and the right to vote after their convictions.

Critics fear the state's botched efforts to bar felons mostly Democrat and many black is a replay of Florida's failed efforts in 2000. The 2000 list was peppered by problems, including 3,000 names of felons convicted in seven states that restore rights automatically upon completion of sentence.

It's unclear how many of those voters were actually removed from the rolls, because some skeptical election supervisors decided to ignore the purge effort.

Those problems were a big reason voting rights groups pressed for change. And as part of the settlement, they thought they had it: Simply, voters convicted in states that automatically restore voting rights would be able to vote this year.

But the bottleneck for more than 1,000 of those voters has voting rights groups worried, coming just months before the November election in a state that barely gave Gov. Jeb Bush's brother the White House four years ago.

MEETING TODAY

Mincberg and his legal team who represented the NAACP in the federal lawsuit against the state over the 2000 list moved in June to reopen the 2-year-old litigation on the out-of-state felon issue. The two sides are set to meet in secret mediation again today.

Neither side would comment on the progress of the mediation, but both said they were ''hopeful'' another accord could be reached.

Attorney David Spector of Steel Hector & Davis, who represents the Division of Elections, said officials have gone beyond the requirements of the 2002 settlement agreement with the NAACP, which instructs the state to:

``Make contact with an appropriate officer or agency of the state in which the conviction was reported in order to determine on a reliable basis whether the individual's rights have been or have not been restored, and to advise the county supervisors of elections of all individuals whose rights were restored.''

Spector said it's up to local supervisors to determine whether to restore rights.

''The state cannot advise supervisors on what to do with this list,'' he said. ``But Secretary Hood and the governor have both made it clear they should err on the side of the voter.''

Herald staff writers Gary Fineout and Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report.