hmmmm...
http://heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040723/NEWS/407230549/1060
"Questions were raised after Hood spent $150,000 on lawyers in an effort to keep the list secret. A judge ordered her to release the list July 1, and newspapers immediately began uncovering mistakes."
Voter-list controversy reaches Ashcroft's desk
The attorney general is urged to appoint a special counsel to investigate Florida election officials.
By CHRIS DAVIS and MATTHEW DOIG
[email protected] [email protected] A national civil rights organization is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to investigate Florida's elections officials.
In a letter sent to Ashcroft Thursday, People for the American Way says state officials may have violated civil rights laws when they created a now-defunct list designed to purge felons from the voter rolls.
The letter to Ashcroft was sent the same day Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood called for her inspector general to review the entire database used to create the purge list.
That list included 22,000 black voters, who tend to vote for Democrats, and only 61 Hispanics, a key voting bloc for Florida Republicans.
Every vote in Florida could matter if this year's presidential election is as close as 2000. Bush won the state by 537 votes, and the win in Florida gave him the presidency.
The Herald-Tribune obtained a copy of the letter to Ashcroft at the same time it was being sent by courier to the attorney general's office Thursday night.
In it, People for the American Way questions Florida election officials' insistence that the exclusion of Hispanics was inadvertent and that the state's election experts simply forgot that it would cause problems.
"It strains credulity to think that a mistake of this magnitude was reported to state officials and was somehow forgotten or ignored for years … ," the group's president, Ralph Neas, wrote.
Officials in Gov. Jeb Bush's office did not return a phone call seeking comment. A spokesperson for Hood declined to comment Thursday about the letter to Ashcroft.
"We haven't seen that letter yet," Department of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said. "Once we receive the letter through official channels, we will be happy to comment on it."
Hood's decision to get her inspector general involved is her boldest step yet in trying to determine what went wrong with the list. She ordered the inspector to review the entire database and to examine what her employees knew about potential problems.
"There's a lot of details that we don't know and we need to get a handle on it. I want the answers and I'm extremely concerned," Hood told the Associated Press Thursday.
But state Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach, said Hood's move falls short of what it will take to restore voters' confidence in Florida's election process.
"The secretary of state needs to be a little more responsive to the public and not pretend like there is nothing wrong here," Klein said.
He said he supports Neas' attempt to tap federal investigators.
Neas said Hood's in-house investigation won't convince voters that their election process is fair.
"This situation begs for an independent special investigation at the highest levels," he said. "Just having the Jeb Bush administration investigate itself, that's not going to pass muster."
The special counsel should investigate if the state violated civil rights by knowingly allowing "a racially discriminatory voting policy to move forward," Neas wrote. They also should determine whether such conduct has compromised past and present elections.
Under the statute governing the special counsel process, Ashcroft, a member of the president's Cabinet, could appoint counsel and recuse himself from the investigation.
People for the American Way will put pressure on Ashcroft by enlisting the help of its 675,000 "members and supporters" nationwide, Neas said.
The group could also get help from the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined with Neas' group to sue Florida for civil rights violations in the 2000 election.
Neas said he will send the letter today to the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee and President Bush and ask for their support in getting a special counsel appointed.
The letter cites news reports showing that state election officials knew that Hispanics could be kept off the list in greater numbers as evidence that Florida may have violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Hood has repeatedly said that any discrepancy with Hispanic voters was unintentional.
But that hasn't quashed Democrats' allegations that Gov. Bush was trying to rig the election in his brother's favor. They point to what they see as mounting evidence that Gov. Bush's administration did more than make an honest mistake.
Questions were raised after Hood spent $150,000 on lawyers in an effort to keep the list secret.
A judge ordered her to release the list July 1, and newspapers immediately began uncovering mistakes.
Six days after the list was released, the Herald-Tribune reported that a flaw in the way it was created virtually ensured no Hispanic felons would get purged.
That disclosure ultimately led the state to scrap the list, which was part of the state's $2 million Central Voter Database.
Contrary to what election officials had claimed, the Herald-Tribune reported Tuesday that they had known for years that Hispanics could disproportionately be left off the purge list under the process they eventually used.
Officials with the private company that created Florida's 2000 purge list told the Herald-Tribune that they shared concerns over the use of race with state officials in 1997 or 1998.
They told state officials that race categories in the two databases used to generate the felon list were incompatible. One classified Hispanics as white, ensuring that Hispanics would be excluded if race was used to match people across databases.
This report includes material from The Associated Press
