Wronged voters still need a right

• Originally published by The News-Press Tallahassee Bureau on August 24, 2004 [here ]

People purged from roll may not get a vote soon

By Paige St. John,

TALLAHASSEE -- As Al Gore and George W. Bush campaigned for president, James Bors received what he called a "really nasty letter" telling him he could not vote in the 2000 election.

Four years later, the design engineer believes it is still true.

"I didn't realize I could vote," Bors, 40, said from his home in Pasco County.

Public records show state officials in Tallahassee knew for almost a year that Bors and nearly 1,000 other voters were wrongly put on the Secretary of State's 1999 and 2000 purge lists.

It was not until Aug. 12 that Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent county election supervisors those names, following a month of mediation with civil rights groups.

Local election officials say they are running out of time to return those people to the rolls before next week's primary, raising the concern they'll be blocked from another election.

"I would be hard-pressed to get it done that fast," said Bill Cowles, Orange County elections supervisor.

He said his staff has not finished reviewing 1,004 other voters identified for removal in 1999 and 2000 and now thought to be wrong.

Restoring rights, "like everything else, will fall into work in progress, along with poll worker training, early voting, absentee voting ..." Cowles said.

Indian River supervisor Kay Clem also said she did not know if she had finished the work of confirming the 239 names given to her by the state in September.

"There's been so much frivolous lawsuits and public records requests," she said. "I'd just like to get back to the work we do."

The Secretary of State's office says it has no power to dictate when and how county election supervisors restore voters to the rolls.

"We don't have the authority to do that," said elections division director Dawn Roberts. "They are independently, constitutionally elected officers ... We try to advise. But we don't have the right to tell supervisors what to do."

County election supervisors in turn say they lack state direction.

There is no state guidance on what steps to take to tell someone, years later, that they can vote after all.

"I think everyone wants to do the right thing, but there's no information. How do you do it?" said Doug Wilkes, elections supervisor  in  Santa  Rosa  County.

For his own part, Wilkes mistrusted the state's old purge lists and did not use them. He expects, therefore, not to need to restore voters.

,b>Lost voters

Undoing the damage from 2000 is problematic.

Sending restoration notices to 4-year-old addresses is bound to result in piles of undelivered mail, election workers said.

"Our voters are very transient," said Lynn Kowalchyk, deputy elections supervisor in Escambia County. "I would think the Secretary of State's office should follow them."

Lee County Supervisor Sharon Harrington also suggested the Secretary of State is better positioned to find lost voters, using such resources as drivers' license records.

As a last resort, she held out hope that the voters themselves would come forward.

"If we can verify there was a mistake, we'll let them vote," she said.

Bors belongs to a special class of voters targeted for removal four years ago. They had past felony convictions, a fact that ordinarily would disqualify them from voting in Florida.

However, these felons committed crimes in one of eight states that automatically restore voting rights.

In Bors' case, it was a felony committed in Illinois more than 20 years ago, "when I screwed up." He has since raised a family and put three sons through college.

Nevertheless, 1,451 such felons were included in the 2000 purge by the Secretary of State's private vendor.

After the contested presidential Florida recounts, the NAACP filed suit over the mass purges. In a 2002 court settlement, Florida agreed to restore voting rights to those who should never have lost them.

In May, the Secretary of State gave county officials names of 482 of the out-of-state felons.

Verifying records

In an interview last month, state election chief Roberts said the NAACP's litigation put her office "under some constraints" of what it can do. And she said other states were slow to provide information proving those felons can vote.

"We had a very difficult time in getting the data from them," Roberts said.

Yet records show that months earlier, Roberts' office received a detailed list from Ohio confirming more than 500 felons had been released from prison.

Auto-restoration, Roberts added, "is a somewhat deceiving term of art sometimes. Some people think automatic means the minute you walk out, you have your civil rights restored."

In Illinois and Ohio, restoration is that easy. Felons are eligible to vote the day they get out of jail. In New Jersey, they must also finish probation.

Bors, by now, is cynical about the election process.

"I've come to the point that when you get down to politics, there's a mess of games," he said. As a Republican in a heavily Democratic county, he was sure his removal from the rolls was no mistake.

Bors will not wait for the news of his right to vote to trickle down from Tallahassee to Pasco County and then to him.

"I don't wait on government for anything," Bors said. "I'll register on my own."