he doesn't have to steal it, he has it in the bag

oh yeah, that is a real concern for most felons - their voting rights - LOL



"WalterM140" wrote in message
...


"Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris
ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida's voter rolls on grounds
that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible,
registered voters. If you're not on the list, you don't get to vote."

-- GregPalast.com

47,000 of these people have -stll- --after over three years, not been
placed
back on the voter rolls.

TAMPA - For the second straight presidential election, Florida's law
against
former felons voting, a law grounded in Old South racism, may prevent
thousands
of people from voting.
Some of those people may be legally entitled to vote. Others won't be able
to
navigate the bureaucratic hurdles of the state's clemency process to get
their
rights restored in time for the election.

But the state government is concentrating on removing as many former
felons
from voting rolls as possible, even though critics charge that it risks
disenfranchising some who are legally entitled to vote. Meanwhile, those
critics charge, the state is dragging its feet on restoring those wrongly
removed from voter rolls in 2000.

Florida is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons
from
voting unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of
having
their rights restored.

That law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000
presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly thousands of voters - no
one
knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls in 2000, some wrongly,
because of errors in a state ``purge list'' of former felons.

Today, as the 2004 election nears:

* More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights
restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that
they
weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years,
and
the list is growing, not shrinking.

* Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never
committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have
been put
back on the rolls.

* A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is
unconstitutional
and affects up to 600,000 people.

Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in
Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may
have
committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their
rolls
again.

Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do
the
purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000.

Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a
letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their
rights
restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.

The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote
Democratic.

In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population
but
make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.

Asked why a new purge list is going out less than six months before the
election, Secretary of State Glenda Hood said it's part of establishing a
statewide voter list, as required by the state's 2001 election reform law.
The
law was passed in the wake of the disputed presidential vote.

``The legislation mandated that as soon as this process [of identifying
improperly registered names] was complete, the information be sent out,''
said
Hood, a Republican and an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush.

But Hood acknowledged ``there is no particular time line'' in the law for
sending purge lists to county elections supervisors.

Hood's staff didn't follow through on a promise to have a staff attorney
call a
reporter to discuss precisely what part of the new law requires that the
list
go out now.

When news of the new purge list broke about three weeks ago, it drew a
chorus
of anger from civil rights advocates who had sued the state over the 2000
election problems.

``Frankly, the state should first fix the problems with people who were
erroneously thrown off in 2000 before they start on another purge,'' said
Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way Foundation,
a
liberal-oriented advocacy group.

State officials are seeking to keep the new purge list secret, but CNN is
suing
to get a copy. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, and several news
organizations
including The Tampa Tribune plan to join the lawsuit.


They Were Purged

Derek Graham, Willie Johnson and Jeffrey Key, who are black and of Tampa,
were
three of the thousands of people legally removed from the voter rolls in
2000.
They have past felony records and hadn't had their rights restored.

But all three also say they had been registered, and voting, for years
before
being turned away in 2000.

``When they release you, they don't tell you that you have to go through a
process to receive those rights back,'' said Key, 40, a Progress Village
homeowner with two grown children, one in college.

Key served four years in the 1980s for armed robbery and got a job on work
release with the same printing company where he is now a supervisor. After
being turned away from the polls in 2000, it took him 2 1/2 years to get
his
rights restored.

Johnson, 69, a retired truck driver, served a short sentence in the 1950s
for
breaking and entering, but had been voting since 1962.

He has sent an application to Tallahassee but doesn't expect to be able to
vote
this year.

``If I did wrong, it's my part,'' he said. ``But I did my time. I haven't
been
in trouble since; I've been working ever since.''

Graham, 38, who operates a street sweeper for the city of Tampa, remembers
voting for the Community Investment Tax in 1996. It has been 17 years
since the
drug possession charge landed him an eight-month sentence. He applied 10
months
ago to have his rights restored. He hasn't heard back.

Graham and Johnson are among 43,847 Floridians waiting to have their
rights
restored as of June 30, 2003.

That number has gone up from 6,437 in June 2001. As part of the settlement
of
litigation prompted by the 2000 election, the state sent restoration
applications to thousands of former felons, which swamped the Executive
Clemency Office staff.

Spokeswoman Jane Tillman said the office hoped the number would decline
this
year, but that depended on the Legislature approving 20 new positions for
investigators. It didn't.

The applicants may have a long wait.

David Scott Stiles of Dover, 34, a truck driver, registered to vote -
legally,
he thought - after getting out of prison for motorcycle theft in 1998. In
2000,
he was purged.

Stiles applied for rights restoration in September 2002 but was just told,
nearly two years later, that his case won't be acted on in time for him to
vote
this year.

``I'm a felon, I screwed up, but I paid for what I did,'' he said. ``Now
it's
time for the state to do what they're supposed to do.''

One reason these voters didn't know they weren't legally entitled to vote
is
that the state of Florida didn't produce felon purge lists before 1999.
The law
was enforced on a haphazard basis, as county clerks of court sent criminal
records to local election supervisors.

The Legislature required state officials to begin aggressively enforcing
the
law after a corrupt city election in Miami in 1997, contaminated mainly by
fraudulent absentee ballots. Investigations also found former felons
voting in
that race.

In 2000, the purge list attempted to capture the names missed over the
years.

It also captured the names of at least 2,120 former felons who moved to
Florida
after having their rights restored in other states.

Under a 1998 court decision, the restoration should have applied in
Florida.
But the names were removed anyway, along with some people whose rights had
been
restored in Florida, and thousands like Graham, Johnson, Key and Stiles,
who
had never had their rights restored because they didn't know they needed
to.


Something Really Wonderful

Florida's felon disenfranchisement law dates from 1868, when the state
produced
a new constitution to win readmission to the Union after the Civil War.

According to Florida historian Jerrell Shofner, it was added by a
political
faction that sought the support of former Confederates.

A member of that faction later boasted that the new state constitution
prevented the state from coming under the influence of black people,
Shofner
said.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a legal advocacy group associated with New
York
University Law School, is suing to have the provision declared
unconstitutional. A trial court judge in Miami dismissed the lawsuit, but
it
was reinstated in a split decision by a three- judge appeals court panel
in
December. The state has asked for review by the full court.

Another post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter
criteria in producing its felon purge lists.

The lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida
Department
of Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In
2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as
many
names as possible, even knowing it would result in ``false positives'' -
people
who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former
counsel
of the Division of Elections.

They relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches
before
removing the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to
complete the task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent
letters
to everyone on their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or
couldn't provide proof they weren't felons.

That resulted in many people being wrongly removed; no one knows how many.
Under the litigation settlement, each county is supposed to report
completion
of its efforts to find and re-register those wrongly removed. Only 33 of
the 67
counties have done so.

Hillsborough Election Supervisor Buddy Johnson said 533 people were
incorrectly
listed as ineligible former felons on Hillsborough's rolls and said those
purged have been re-registered.

Many election officials, including Kurt Browning in Pasco County, don't
see the
need for disenfranchising former felons to begin with.

``If they're going to be released, we want them to be assimilated back
into
society,'' said Browning, Pasco's elections supervisor. ``If they get a
job,
pay taxes, why shouldn't they have the right to vote?''


Election Supervisors Concerned

Hood said the statewide voter list required by the 2001 reform law was
finished
on time, in May 2002. But settling the NAACP lawsuit and devising the new
matching criteria delayed production of the felon purge list until now,
she
said.

She said the names are considered ``potential matches,'' which the
supervisor
must check for accuracy.

``A supervisor is going to make absolutely certain that the name should be
removed,'' and won't ``unless they have absolute proof,'' she said.

That means this year's process will be different from 2000, said State
Department spokeswoman Jenny Nash, because the burden of proof is on the
supervisor to make sure the voter is a felon, not on the voter to prove
innocence.

But the supervisors themselves aren't so sure.

Deciding whether a voter has a criminal record can be a tricky
investigative
task, involving names, Social Security numbers and birth dates that are
similar
but don't quite match, and checks of state or nationwide criminal records.

``I'm trying to figure out by what authority, why we have to investigate
this
list of people,'' Browning said. ``It's not my job. I'm not an
investigator. I
don't know what I'm doing with this stuff.''

Other supervisors, including Ion Sancho of Leon County, have said they
don't
have the staff or money for investigations or the mailings or
advertisements
intended to notify affected voters.

According to instructions published on the State Department Web site, if a
voter fails to respond to a letter within 30 days, the supervisor is
required
to remove the name from the list. Browning said that appears to leave the
burden of proof on the voter, just as in 2000. ``I'm trying to figure out
what's different,'' he said.

``If I got a letter saying you might be a felon, I'm not going to let that
sit,'' Browning said. But some may not respond because of address changes,
misunderstanding or other errors.

``For whatever reason, the assumption is that if they don't respond, maybe
they
are a felon,'' he said.

Asked whether supervisors are free to ignore the lists, Hood responded,
``I
think the supervisors are going to be very cautious that they don't
eliminate
any voter from the list if they don't have absolute proof.''


Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761.


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