Florida Central Voter File
The exclusion of eligible voters from the file was a central part of the controversy surrounding the US presidential elections in 2000, which hinged on results in Florida.
This led to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, banning discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans off the voter rolls.
[4] In a February 2001 phone conversation with the BBC's London studios, ChoicePoint vice-president James Lee said that the state "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon".
[5][6] On 17 April 2001, James Lee testified before the McKinney panel that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90% of a last name.
"We are not confident any of the methods used today can guarantee legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote", Lee told a group of Atlanta-area black lawmakers in March 2001.
Examples:[citation needed] According to the Palm Beach Post (among other issues), though blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida's voters.
Skeptical of the list's accuracy, elections supervisors in 20 counties (including Palm Beach) ignored it altogether, thereby allowing thousands of felons to vote.
[7] The Palm Beach Post reported that [C]omputer analysis has found at least 1,100 eligible voters wrongly purged from the rolls before last year's election.
One Naples man was told he couldn't vote because he was linked with a felon still serving time in a Moore Haven prison.
For example, Linda Howell, Madison County supervisor of elections, who is not a convicted felon and was never on the felon list provided by the Division of Elections or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, erroneously received a form letter referencing a prior felony conviction from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement stating[further explanation needed].
The problems with the list, the process by which it was manufactured and deployed, and other issues related to the 2000 election controversy in Florida, triggered much criticism and allegations of fraud, which resulted in investigations, litigation, and reform measures.
Phyllis Hampton, general counsel of the Florida Election Commission, testified that her office could investigate the wrongful removal of a Floridian from the voter rolls if there was evidence of a willful violation.
[10] In June 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report and statements[11][12] arguing that Florida was, on numerous counts, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, recommending: In February 2002, the NAACP and four other groups filed suit against Harris (NAACP v. Harris), the county elections supervisor and a former state election chief.
The suit charges that Black voters were disenfranchised during the 2000 presidential election, and argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the US Constitution's 14th Amendment.
