Investigation of Felon Voters Is Delayed Until After Election
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: October 30, 2004
MIAMI, Oct. 29 - The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said on Friday that it would wait until after Election Day to investigate Republican charges that nearly 1,000 convicted felons had illegally requested absentee ballots or voted early in the presidential election.
The state Republican Party said on Thursday that it had combed a state list of suspected felons and found 925, mostly Democrats, who had not had their voting rights restored, but had requested ballots or voted early. The party said that altogether, it had identified more than 14,000 registered voters who should not be allowed to because they were felons whose voting rights had not been restored.
But the announcement drew instant criticism because Gov. Jeb Bush scrapped the list of 48,000 suspected felons last summer after revelations that it was inaccurate.
Mindy Tucker Fletcher, senior adviser to the Florida Republican Party, said it had not decided whether to use the list to challenge voters at the polls on Tuesday. She said the party had sent the names to the 67 county elections supervisors, who she said it was hoped would "spend the weekend following up."
The Republicans also turned over the names to the Law Enforcement Department on Friday, but Tom Berlinger, a department spokesman, said there was not enough time to investigate the contentions before Tuesday. He said the department would work with county elections supervisors after Election Day, if necessary, to determine whether convicted felons voted illegally.
"It's not ideal," Ms. Tucker Fletcher said of the delay, "but we understand the position they are in."
Florida is among a handful of states that permanently strips all people convicted of felonies of the right to vote. While they can apply to have the right reinstated, the process can take a long time and many who seek reinstatement do not get it.
Also on Friday, Florida's secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, issued guidelines for challenging voters' eligibility on Election Day. Voters can be made to cast provisional ballots, according to the guidelines, if there is any "reasonable question" as to their eligibility. Precinct clerks and inspectors make the decision based on evidence presented by the challenger. Provisional ballots are not counted until the voter's eligibility is confirmed; many end up getting thrown out.
Courtenay Strickland, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said she thought the guidelines would keep Republicans from challenging the eligibility of the 14,000 convicted felons because they require more evidence than someone's name simply being on the state list of suspected felons.
In 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were mistakenly removed from the Florida rolls after ending up on a list of suspected felons that a company working for the state compiled. Some of those legal voters - no one is sure how many - were turned away from the polls that year, stirring outrage that led to lawsuits.
Democrats and civil rights groups complained when the state compiled another list of suspected felons this year, and the list was scrapped after news organizations reported it was flawed. Among other things, it included thousands of blacks, who often vote Democratic, but only 61 Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican in Florida.
Counties continued purging felons from the voting rolls even without the list, using records they receive monthly from court clerks. But Ms. Tucker Fletcher said it appeared that the system let many felons remain on the voting rolls.
She said the Republican Party was certain the felons it had identified as voting had not had their rights restored, because the party checked their names against a newly updated list of felons who had received state clemency.
That clemency list has proved unreliable because it leaves off many felons whose rights were restored in the 1970's.
The larger list of 14,489 felons who might vote illegally on Tuesday includes people who were not on the clemency list but who voted in 2000 or 2002, or are newly registered to vote this year.
Senator John Kerry's campaign released a statement accusing the Republicans of "engaging in a desperate last-minute strategy to wrongfully target legal voters."
In Broward County, where thousands of people have complained that their absentee ballots never arrived in the mail, elections officials said Friday that about 9,000 replacement ballots had been mailed out on Thursday and 3,000 more would go out on Friday, mostly to Democratic voters. Brenda Snipes, the elections supervisor, said that 60 percent of the 128,000 ballots her office mailed out had been returned.
