Thousands Who Have Had Their Voting Rights Restored May Remain on FL Purge Lists; Massive Discrepancies Revealed in 2 Government Clemency Lists

6/8/2004

From: Scott Schell, 212-998-6318, or Natalia Kennedy, 212-998-6736, both of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law

NEW YORK, June 8 - Documents obtained from the State of Florida reveal that the state's "felon match" list for purging voters may include many of 25,585 people whose voting rights have been restored through clemency grants or pardons. Unless corrective action is taken, those wrongly placed on the purge list will be unable to vote in this year's presidential election.

The Florida Division of Elections (DOE) attempts to identify registered voters who should be taken off the rolls because of previous felony convictions, using criminal history data supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. To avoid the disfranchisement of eligible voters, people with felony convictions who have been granted clemency and had their voting rights restored must be removed from that group; otherwise, their names may be wrongly purged from the voter rolls.

According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the Florida Division of Elections database identifies 145,823 individuals who have been granted clemency since 1964. Documents obtained from the Florida Office of Executive Clemency show a different - and larger - number of records of processed clemency cases and pardons over the same period, tallying 171,408 individuals. To obtain official documents click on: http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/flpurge_press_release_materials.pdf.pdf

The information available to the Brennan Center allowed only for the calculation of the discrepancy between the clemency lists of DOE and the Office of Executive Clemency. Not all 25,585 potential voters making up this difference will appear on the state's purge list. Because the records date back 40 years to 1964, some of the 25,585 have died or moved out of state. Some have never registered to vote notwithstanding the restoration of their civil rights. It is impossible to estimate how many of these 25,585 names will appear on the felon match list, in part because the state refuses access to the list. What is known is that for the 17-year period from 1976 through 1992, when the highest numbers of people had their civil rights restored, the Office of Executive Clemency count of processed cases exceeds the DOE count by 18,582 individuals.

"To settle a federal lawsuit, Florida agreed to clean up the civil rights violations we saw in 2000 when thousands of eligible voters were wrongly identified as having a felony conviction barring them from the polls," said Jessie Allen, associate counsel at the Brennan Center. "Now we're discovering new errors in the administration of Florida's undemocratic laws aimed at separating people from their most basic right as Americans."