The New York Times

July 10, 2004

Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed
By Ford Fessenden

Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a
listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are
recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials
acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as
Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.

Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are
Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.

About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and
about 11 percent as black.

In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race
by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be
significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics
in Florida tend to vote Republican.

Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied any
partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it had
been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit.

"This was absolutely unintentional," said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman
for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Gov.
Jeb Bush, the president's brother. "The matching criteria were approved
by several interested parties in the lawsuit, and the court. I don't
know how it got by all those people without anyone noticing."

Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: "The governor is
complying with the law and complying with the settlement. Recognizing
now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State is looking into
the options."

Anita Earls, one of the lawyers for plaintiffs in the civil rights suit,
said state officials had not given them the kind of access to data that
might have uncovered the flaw.

The method uses race as one of several factors in determining whether a
felon has registered to vote. If a voter's first name, last name and
date of birth are the same as those of a convicted felon but the race is
different, the name is not put on the list for potential purging.

But the database of felons has only five variables for race: white,
black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic
whose name and birth date matched a felon's would be left off the purge
list unless his race was listed as unknown.

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Kristen
Perezluha, said the felon database used F.B.I. criteria for judging race
and so never listed Hispanic.

Florida undertook a similar purge of voter rolls in 2000, but that list
was shown to include the names of many who were not felons. The new
effort at such a purge, begun by Governor Bush's administration in May,
was supposed to be free of those problems. But after a state judge last
week ordered the release of the current list, it became clear that
thousands of felons who had been granted clemency were still on it.

Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the last
straw. "Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to
voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, "or
they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's
unacceptable.''

"The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the list out
and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election."

Some county election supervisors have said they are reluctant to use the
state's list to purge the names of any voters. The law leaves that
responsibility to the county officials, but it is unclear how many will
use it.

"It's an impossible task to do properly," said Ion Sancho, the
supervisor in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle.

The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported
Wednesday, by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that
the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the
data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of
felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who
identified themselves as Hispanic.

Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000
voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one
million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of
Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in
party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of
28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest
unaffiliated.