Recent Presidential Elections

2000 Election

Florida -- Voter Disenfranchisement

Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold … [;] thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.

Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn’t vote because she had voted absentee—even though she hadn’t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who’d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn’t on the rolls. She was moved to the “problem line”; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.

U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn’t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. “We put them on buses,” she says, “took them down to the supervisor’s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!” Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn’t vote because he was a felon—even though he wasn’t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. “What happened that day—I can’t even put it in words anymore,” says Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. “It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.”

For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ’94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. “Probably nothing,” he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb’s office. “[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,” says Meek. Jeb wasn’t moved by their presence. “Kick their asses out,” he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996.

Election Day itself felt like payback. Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy. Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe. Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.

In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony. In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.

Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election—from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.

Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida’s poorest counties. African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state. Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.

“He thought things were ‘fine as they were,’” says ... Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner ... When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn’t budge. “He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll,” says Dixon. “In the only county that’s a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”

In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson’s deputy, a soft-spoken African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office. After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.

How had this happened? Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail. The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the “on” position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review. After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off. “I have no idea why he would do that,” says Knight. Seeing how many ballots never got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again—this time with the sorting switch on—but he resisted. Hutchinson was finally overruled by the Gadsden canvassing board. They looked at the rejected ballots. Sure enough, they were overvotes—and for good reason.

Gadsden had used a variant of the caterpillar ballot, in which the candidates’ names appeared in two columns. One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others. The next column listed two more candidates—Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips—as well as a line that said, “Write-In Candidate.” Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote “Gore” in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed.

In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot. But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake. [State elections officials] should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.

Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county’s “automatic recount,” giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count. Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren’t as lucky.

Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden. Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.

During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican. “I asked John Stafford how many under- and overvotes there were, and he said, ‘Oh, just a few,’” recalls Langton. Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.

Then there was the matter of usage of a very inaccurate felons list.

If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people—many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran—went to the polls and were informed that they couldn’t vote, because they were convicted felons—even though they weren’t.

“The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,” says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn’t a felon.

“I’ve never been arrested before in my life,” Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn’t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. “She brushed me off and said, ‘Hey, get to the side,’” recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993—when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Steen wasn’t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn’t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.

The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. “Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it’s not discussed, no one cares,” says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.”

How the state ended up with the “felon list” in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history. In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.

In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”

… black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. …

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… While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who’d served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.

The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people “voted,” as did 105 felons. Seventy-one percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats. Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that “the division shall annually contract with a private entity” to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated “mentally incompetent” to vote, and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998, 1999, or 2000.

When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up. One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000. After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner. In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job. “There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project,” DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail. “The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help).” The little bird was correct.

From the start, there were questions about the felon list. “We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,” says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office. “We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls. Boy, did that cause a firestorm.” One of those letters was sent to Sancho’s friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon. “Very few felons,” Sancho points out, “are members of the Florida bar.”

Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it. Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, the Division of Elections’ assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people. “Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem,” recalls Sancho, “that it was the vendor’s [DBT’s] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it.”

James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite. “Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match,” says Lee. “Because after the first year they weren’t getting enough names.”

And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases. Middle initials didn’t need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah—same thing. Nicknames were fine—Robert, Bob, Bobby. The spelling of the last name didn’t have to be exact, either. The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O’Steen.

DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in “false positives” (i.e., wrongly included people). Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state’s position: “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.

In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas. But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren’t guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem. How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place? Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.

According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who’d had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida. Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states. In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida. …

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When the “corrected” list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it. In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons. As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list. Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking. “We went for a five-for-five match,” says Sancho. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”

Other elections supervisors did no such investigation. In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value. Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor, “it was pretty much a done deal.” In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal. If he didn’t hear back from them, these names were simply struck. Throughout the state, many of these letters came back “undeliverable.” Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.

A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens’ advocates. In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list. If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls. Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person. “We were going back to the state and saying, ‘This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,’” Iorio recalls. “‘He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he’s been employed here and done this.’ Twice they said, ‘No, that’s incorrect.’ In writing. . . . And he never voted in the 2000 election.” Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong (Margolick17-27).

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said (Berman 2-3).

On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge. He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.

“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.

“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said (Berman 8).

The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future. The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from “automatic restoration” states. DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida’s elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn’t have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000—more than a third of DBT’s May 2000 list. The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.

More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush’s government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida’s rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way. In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to “re-evaluate.” No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.

Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names. But others have put it aside; as of June [2004], more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it. (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-sent the list.) In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names. Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.

These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list. But in Florida, it seems, there’s always another angle. Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list. This list came to 48,000 names. Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process. For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm. “I asked my staff, ‘Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?’ They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren’t felons,” Sancho says, storming about his office.

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For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000. On May 12, in one of [Director of the Elections Division Ed] Kast’s last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature—even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections,” says Sancho.

As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction. In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list. Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.

It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.

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In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November (Margolick 28-34).

Works cited:

Berman, Ari, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement.” The Nation, July 28, 2015. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/

Margolick, David, “The Path to Florida.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2014. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/10/florida-election-2000