-Caveat Lector- Published Friday, January 19, 2001, in the Miami Herald 452 felons cast votes illegally in Broward Hundreds of other ballots in doubt BY LISA ARTHUR, GEOFF DOUGHERTY AND WILLIAM YARDLEY [EMAIL PROTECTED] At least 452 felons voted illegally at the polls in Broward County on Nov. 7, casting more doubt on the effectiveness of state laws to protect the integrity of the ballot box, a Herald investigation has found. The tainted votes -- found during a review of 587,928 votes cast in Broward -- underscore concerns about the failure of Florida's multimillion-dollar effort to prevent election fraud by eliminating dead and illegal voters from the registration rolls. An earlier investigation by The Herald found that of 2.3 million votes reviewed in 22 counties, at least 789 Florida felons cast ballots. That investigation found 30 absentee votes cast by felons in Broward. Joseph Cotter, assistant supervisor of elections in Broward, said he's surprised there were that many. ``No felon should be voting,'' he said. ``We try to keep the rolls clean, but I know the problems and limits of the information we're working with.'' Like other supervisors around the state, Cotter faulted the ``inaccurate'' anti-fraud effort the state undertook after the 1997 Miami mayoral race was overturned because it was rife with fraud. The state Division of Elections hired Boca Raton-based Database Technologies Inc. to compare voter registration rolls to criminal databases and lists of dead people. The lists cast a wide net, and thousands who were eligible to vote found themselves excluded. Some counties used the list to clean up their voting rolls. Broward sent out about 4,000 certified letters to targeted voters. After an outcry here and accusations around the state that the data was unreliable and riddled with bad information, Broward adopted an honor system. ``The state itself said we could not depend on the accuracy of the data,'' Cotter said. ``We got hundreds of calls from people saying they were not felons. So we told people it was their responsibility to have us remove them from the list if they actually were felons who had not had their rights restored.'' State records show that the 67 supervisors of elections were told of the lists' limitations, that the matches were graded as ``possible'' and ``probable,'' and that the responsibility of verifying the accuracy of the matches was theirs. ``We wanted these lists to be fairly broad and encompassing,'' Emmett ``Bucky'' Mitchell, a former Florida Division of Elections lawyer who headed the purge effort, told The Herald in December. ``It was never intended to be a cure-all.'' Some counties such as Duval and Palm Beach essentially ignored the list. Others treated it with great skepticism and did very little with it, interviews with supervisors have shown. In addition to the difficulty of coming up with a way to administer and enforce the laws against felons voting, the laws themselves have been attacked by civil-liberties advocates. Several groups have filed a federal lawsuit alleging the process -- which requires felons to complete what some call burdensome paperwork -- discriminates against blacks. Florida is one of 14 states with such policies. Deerfield Beach resident Douglas Griffin says the law is unfair. He has voted regularly since he was released from prison in 1990 after serving time for an aggravated child-abuse conviction. In the 2000 presidential election, the registered Democrat said he voted for Vice President Al Gore. ``I just went [and] my name was on the [rolls] so I just voted. I wasn't supposed to? Well, I didn't know that,'' Griffin said Thursday. Griffin, 45, said he has been registered since he turned 18 and votes every chance he gets. He said he believed his voting rights were restored upon his release. ``From my understanding it was after X amount of years without any criminal act, after you're released,'' he said. ``Why should it always slap me in the face? That's like going through a ghost house. It's all behind me. It's over and done.'' Charles Bodziak said he was released from prison in 1993 after serving time for several convictions, including burglary and theft. He said he registered to vote when he applied for a driver's license six years ago. I told them I was a felon, and I said, `You sure I can vote?' She said `Yes, I don't see any problem with it,' '' Bodziak, 55, of Fort Lauderdale, recalled Thursday. ``I was surprised, but then I thought, after I served my time, why shouldn't I be able to vote? I didn't mean nothing wrong by it.'' Miriam Oliphant, Broward's newly elected supervisor of elections who took office 14 days ago, says she believes people like Griffin and Bodziak truly don't know they are ineligible to vote. ``They think it is all OK after they serve their time,'' Oliphant said. ``My job now is to educate people, improve communication with the state, intervene and prevent it from happening in the future.'' To find felony voters, The Herald compared a list of all Broward residents who voted Nov. 7 to a Department of Corrections database. Reporters then checked those names against a database of felons who had been granted clemency and are now allowed to vote. Only those who served at least a year in state prison and have not received clemency are included in The Herald's tally of felony voters. Of the illegal 452 ballots, 343 were cast by Democrats and 62 by Republicans. Elections records also show that as many as 400 other illegal ballots were cast in Broward County's Nov. 7 election, most of them by unregistered voters. Time after time across Broward, poll workers violated safeguards intended to thwart voter fraud by allowing people to vote when their names did not appear on precinct voter registers. All the voters had to do was sign statements swearing they were eligible to vote. Oliphant thinks technology is the answer in both problems. She wants poll workers to have laptops to check the sworn statements against Broward voter databases instead of having to phone elections office workers for confirmation. And she wants the state to come up with a way for Broward and other counties to tap into the state's primary criminal databases so they can spot-check and verify information on the purge list and subsequent updates. Cotter agrees. And while they've both heard the arguments about such a system being too costly, both wonder if the state can afford not to fix the problem. ``We all need to look at the cost this has to the whole integrity of the election process here in Florida,'' Cotter said. Herald staff researcher Tim Henderson contributed to this story. Contact Us Copyright 2001 Miami Herald <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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