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Jeb Bush Makes It Harder to Get Voting Rights Restored •
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Fear of Fraud
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Tuesday 27 July 1004
It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.
Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."
Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.
Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.
This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.
The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.
After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.
But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.
Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.
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Bush Takes Back Good Move on Voting
Pensacola News Journal
Tuesday 27 July 2004
We were premature in praising Gov. Jeb Bush for taking the high road in the matter of restoring voting rights for felons who have served their sentences and been released from prison.
No doubt it's our fault for underestimating the politics involved. And for thinking that the embarrassing hash the state had made of its efforts to purge the rolls of ineligible voters had shamed the governor into seeking a good-faith fix.
Now it looks as if the governor simply sees political benefit in keeping people off the voting rolls.
It's almost as if the governor takes delight in showing his contempt for a political system based on a non-partisan respect for voting rights, the very essence of our system. Just when it looked as if he was stepping up to do the right thing, he showed partisanship more apt for an old-fashioned ward heeler than the governor of Florida.
Earlier this month the state had withdrawn the badly flawed list of names it had sent to local elections supervisors to use in purging ineligible voters. Included were the names of felons who had served their terms and become eligible to have their rights restored, but who might have failed to have it done. But the list erroneously included many voters whose rights had been restored; meanwhile, it turned out that many individuals had been voting despite not having their rights restored. The errors were so numerous that the state looked incompetent, at best.
Then, last week, an appeals court ruled unanimously that prison officials must follow the law - imagine that! - and do more to help released felons with the paperwork needed to schedule a hearing to get their rights restored. The state already submits the names for automatic restoration of rights, but the Catch-22 is that most are rejected, requiring them to ask for a hearing.
Under Bush, the necessary paperwork to request a hearing had been cut from 12 pages to one, making the process easier. But people released from prison usually have more pressing needs - such as finding a job and a place to live. And given that many ex-convicts have limited education, expecting them to wade through what increasingly looks like a hostile state bureaucracy after their release is one more burden in the way of returning to full citizenship.
The court ruling meant that the restorative process would begin prior to release from prison, a big help with the bureaucracy.
But Bush then announced that to "streamline the process" he was doing away with the one-page form. It would now be up to those released from prison to contact the state by letter, e-mail or phone to request a clemency hearing ... once they had been notified that they had been rejected in the "automatic" process.
That doesn't "streamline" anything - it makes it harder to get rights restored. Gov. Bush, of course, knows that. By pretending differently, he simply shows his contempt for the whole process.
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Jump to TO Features for Wednesday July 28, 2004
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