Thousands of people with the right to vote turn away by error and you wish to turn more valid voters away all to try to keep Republians in power.
Shame on you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File
Problems in the cleansing processAt 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.[4]
In February 2000, in a phone conversation with 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".[5][6]
[edit] James Lee's testimonyOn 17 April, 2001, James Lee testified, before the McKinney panel, that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90% of a last name. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non-felons).[7]
Lee went on saying that the state then ordered DBT to shift to an even lower threshold of 80% match, allowing also names to be reversed (thus a person named Thomas Clarence could be taken to be the same as Clarence Thomas). Besides this, middle initials were skipped, Jr. and Sr. suffixes dropped, and some 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". According to Lee, to this suggestion the state told the company, "Forget about it".
"The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant... they told them what would happen", said Lee. "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 2001.[8]
[edit] Errors in the listFlorida has re-edited its felon list five times since 1998 to correct 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.
Examples:
Thomas Cooper, Date of Birth September 5, 1973; crime, unknown; conviction date, January 30, 2007
Johnny Jackson Jr., Date of Birth, 1970; crime, none, mistaken for John Fitzgerald Jackson who was still in his jail cell in Texas
Wallace McDonald, Date of Birth, 1928; crime, fell asleep on a bus-stop bench in 1959
Reverend Willie Dixon, convicted in the 1970s at the latest; note, received full executive clemency
Randall J. Higginbotham, Date of Birth, August 28, 1960; crimes, none, mistaken for Sean David Higginbotham, born June 16, 1971
Reverend Willy D. Whiting Jr., crime, a speeding ticket from 1990, confused with Willy J. Whiting who have birthdays 2 days apart
[edit] Demographics of the purge listAccording to the Palm Beach Post, among other problems with the list, although blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida's voters.[9]
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.[10]
[edit] Pre-election cleansing
Florida Secretary of State Katherine HarrisBetween May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state, Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, distributed the scrub lists produced by the cleansing process to counties and ordered the 57,700 people identified as "ex-felons" to be removed from voter rolls. Together the lists comprised nearly 1% of Florida's electorate and nearly 3% of its African-American voters.[citation needed]
At the time of the election, the purge list contained a number of false positives — people identified as felons who were not actually felons.
[edit] Details about the errorsThere were many specific problems with the purge list regarding the verification of felons, including over 4,000 blank conviction dates, and over 325 conviction dates dating in the future.[11]
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, were included on the list. According to a 1998 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeals, they cannot then be ruled ineligible by another state.[citation needed]
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.
Additionally, a number of persons listed as felons had been convicted of misdemeanors only, and therefore were eligible 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). Thomas Cooper, the second one in the list, was listed as being convicted on January 30, 2007.
[edit] AnalysisThe Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said that the national figure for "standard" margin of error for legal disenfranchisement is about 2%.[citation needed]
Database experts consulted by Greg Palast (including DBT's vice-president) told him that in order to obtain 85% accuracy or better, one needs at least the following three things:
Social Security numbers;
Address history;
A check against other databases.
ChoicePoint, in contrast, used virtually no Social Security numbers, did not check address histories, and used no database cross-checking, although it had 1,200 databases that could be employed for the task.
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.[12]
Mark Hull, the former senior programmer for CDB Infotek, a ChoicePoint company, said the state and ChoicePoint could have chosen criteria that would have brought down the number of false positives to less than 1%. George W. Bush officially received fewer than 600 more votes in Florida than Al Gore (2000 presidential election).[citation needed]
The only reliable measure of accuracy 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%.[citation needed]
The Palm Beach Post reported that
"[C]omputer 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."[13]
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 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."[citation needed]
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."[citation needed]
[edit] AppealsIn time, an appeals process was instituted, but in some cases it required ordinary citizens to be fingerprinted in order to prove they were not 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation
