Big Worries in Florida for Repeat Election Fiasco

Harper, absentee ballots no longer need a witness? When did that happen?

Sometime since 2000.

More on the fiasco and the possible impending fiasco

Florida knew of voter list problems

BY DAVID KIDWELL

[email protected]


TALLAHASSEE - Well before they abruptly discarded it, Florida election officials knew they had significant problems with a database of felons they planned to use in removing voters from the rolls.

Just a week before they directed local election chiefs to begin purging ineligible voters from the list of 48,000 convicted felons, state officials documented two years of failures and breakdowns with the $2.7 million contract with database vendor Accenture.

A May 2 internal memo, ordered personally by Secretary of State Glenda Hood, details a half dozen missed deadlines and broken promises, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems.

Two months after the memo, with newspapers including The Herald detailing major flaws with the felon database that could have disenfranchised thousands, the state reversed course and told election chiefs not to use the felon list.

The problems outlined in the five-page memo do not directly foreshadow the exact glitches that forced the state to abandon the list. But the memo makes clear that the state was hitting constant hurdles in its quest to rush out a list of voters who could be deleted from the rolls.

Critics who have closely monitored Florida's voting process say the chronology shows that the state was negligent.

''This memo is striking,'' said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ``After two years of constant failures and fixes . . . they rushed this out the door.

``We are talking about one of our most fundamental rights, the right to vote. Maybe they should have considered the possibility that accuracy was more important than speed.''

State officials say their intentions were merely to remove ineligible voters. In Florida, convicted felons cannot vote unless the right is restored.

MOVING SWIFTLY

Yet a former official involved in the process acknowledged that the state was moving rapidly.

'We were quickly approaching the `drop dead' date, when we knew it would be too late to put it out there for the election,'' Ed Kast, the former director of the Division of Elections, who retired in June, said in an interview.

''Of course we were frustrated. We all wanted to know why it couldn't get done faster,'' he said.

Executives at Accenture, one of the world's largest technology consulting firms, were caught unaware by the memo when contacted by The Herald. The newspaper obtained it in a public records request.

''We've never seen this document before,'' said Jim McAvoy, spokesman for Accenture.

He acknowledged some ``technical and staffing issues, which resulted in a delay of approximately five months.''

But he said the state asked for many changes that helped exacerbate delays. He declined to discuss specific details of the memo, saying the company intends to discuss them first with state auditors looking into the problems.

The memo came just days before state officials were going to order local election chiefs to use the database to remove thousands of ineligible voters.

The Herald obtained the list and, on July 2, reported that it contained more than 2,100 felons whose voting rights had been restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black.

As The Herald was preparing its report, a Tallahassee judge ordered the
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Now kep in mind, a lawsuit was necessary to get the state to unseal all of this info. There is no doubt in my mind, there was criminal acivity involved in the 2000 election but you can't expect a criminal to prosecute himself.