Avoiding a Florida Redux It seems that Florida may now truly be placed in the battleground state category. What was lost in all the discussion of chads and butterfly ballots in 2000 was the true tragedy for voters in Florida and all those that feel democracy is important, the illegal purge of tens of thousands of voters.

Greg Palast Here's how the president of the United States was elected: In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.

Although Florida officials claimed knowledge about the problems with the list, the list was used again in the 2002 election that re-elected Jeb Bush as Governor.

Greg Palast Originally we thought it was 57,000 people that were purged. Now I got the info from DBT that there were 94,000 people in this list. 91,000 were innocent. If those people have voted, Al Gore would most likely have received the 537 votes that he needed to win. What makes the story so sad and rotten is that the Secretary of State of Florida, Katherine Harris, has agreed that innocent people were removed, but they dragged their feet and have used this same list in this election.

According to the settlement from the NAACP lawsuit, the State has to revise the list and return the voting rights to the innocent ones. But they are going to wait until after the elections to do so.

All does not seem to be lost for 2004. According the Miami Herald, Florida state officials have decided against using such a list for 2004.

Miami Herald Florida election officials conceded an enormous mistake Saturday and abandoned the controversial list the state was using to remove convicted felons from the voter rolls.

After defending the list against mounting criticism as late as Friday evening, the state made an about-face. The reason: a flaw in a database that failed to capture most felons who classified themselves as Hispanic.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood announced at 1 p.m. Saturday that an ''unintentional and unforeseen discrepancy . . . related to Hispanic classification'' had forced the agency to eliminate the entire list from further consideration this year.

The announcement was an embarrassment for top state officials from Gov. Jeb Bush down, and it was enthusiastically lauded by voting rights advocates -- and those on the list.

The Division of Elections had created the list of registered voters with possible felony convictions. It then directed local elections supervisors across Florida to identify convicted felons whose voting rights had not been restored and remove them from the rolls.

Yet of the nearly 48,000 names, just 61 were classified as Hispanics, in a state where Hispanics comprise 8 percent of the population.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way Foundation, who was co-counsel in a lawsuit challenging an earlier 2000 purge list, said: ``This smells to high heaven. It strains credulity to think that Hispanics were somehow left off the list, while African Americans remained on the list.''

Hispanics in Florida register Republican more often than Democratic. By contrast, more than 90 percent of the nearly one million black voters in Florida are Democrats.

Of the 47,763 potentially ineligible voters, a Herald analysis found that 59 percent were Democrats, 19 percent were Republicans and 22 percent were listed as ``other.''

Gov. Bush's administration has repeatedly denied there was any partisan motive in the way the list was developed. Critics, however, say there was no room for error in a state that delivered the White House to Bush's brother George by just 537 votes in the 2000 presidential election.

This change in course is largely attributed to a story that ran in the New York Times. According to an analysis in the Miami Herald:

Miami Herald Sensing a mounting public relations disaster less then four months before what could be another squeaker of a presidential election, state officials Saturday yanked the controversial ''felon-purge'' voter list. It was a concession to the critics who barraged the administration with complaints and data showing that the list was riddled with errors -- this despite Gov. Jeb Bush's vow that the state, after the 2000 debacle, would become a model of election reform for the nation.

The decision to scrap the list, endorsed by Bush, was a deft public relations move by a politician keenly attuned to staying on message and telling all who will listen that he inherited most of the state's voting problems from previous administrations.

The controversy started to blaze out of Bush's control when The Herald reported that more than 2,100 people remained on the list of potentially ineligible voters despite having won clemency -- the right to vote -- after serving their sentences. Many of them were black -- part of the Democratic base that mobilized against George W. Bush's candidacy in 2000 and nearly cost him the presidential election.

Then the discovery this week that Hispanics -- who in Florida lean Republican -- weren't on the felon purge list sent Bush critics and conspiracy theorists into overdrive, considering that the list was prepared by a Republican administration that went to court to block the public's right to review it.

For Bush critics, it all sounded eerily similar to the events of 2000, in which thousands of blacks complained of being denied the right to vote in the state that delivered the White House to the governor's brother by just 537 votes.

''The actions of the state have been either inept or nefarious,'' said Ralph Neas, president of People For the American Way, which challenged the state's similarly flawed purge list in 2000.

The decision to drop the controversial list, following the disclosure of the Hispanic omission Saturday in The New York Times, was said to be that of Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a Bush appointee. And Bush quickly said that he agreed.

''It was the right thing to do,'' Bush said Saturday in Miami. ``The perception of all this begins to become reality. . . .''

But newspapers have continued to focus on the voting mishaps, and the story went national on Saturday with the New York Times piece.

Civil rights groups said the state led by the self-proclaimed ''e-governor'' has routinely failed to deliver an accurate felon-purge list and predicted that more stories about mistakes would emerge.

Bush, though, defended the state's election readiness to reporters, noting that Florida has spent $30 million on voter education programs and millions more on new voting machines.

''We're in much better shape today as it relates to this state dealing with a close election,'' he said.

Democrats said the governor did the right thing in killing the list but added that he must go further.

''It's not enough just to scrap the list,'' said Tony Welch, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. ``This is a red flag for Gov. Bush and the Legislature to review the entire elections process because Florida does not need another debacle on Election Day 2004. That would be inexcusable.''

Further Reading:
New York Times Article
THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME How the ?felon? voter-purge was itself felonious   ¶ 5:04 PM