The operative phrase is “election fraud,” though in Republican parlance it is usually called “voter fraud.” Republicans claim, loudly and regularly, that an army of ineligible voters—illegal immigrants, convicted felons, dead people—has been invading American polling places, diminishing the value of honest voters’ sacred ballots. They make the charge in states where the administration of elections is highly competent, and in states where it is grossly incompetent. It is, of course, leveled solely against Democrats and their supporters.
The charges are almost invariably debunked—by courts, by prosecutors, by state elections officials and by local newspapers that probe beyond partisan screeching and get down to the facts.
At first, Florida specified only exact matches on names, birthdates and genders to identify voters as felons. However, state records reveal a memo dated March 1999 from Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, a lawyer for the state elections office who was supervising the felon purge, asking DBT to loosen its criteria for acceptable matches. When DBT representatives warned Mitchell that this would yield a large proportion of false positives (mismatches), Mitchell’s reply was that it would be up to each county elections supervisor to deal with the problem.[citation needed]
In February 2000, in a 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”.[citation needed]
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[edit]James Lee’s testimony
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. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non-felons).[
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“The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant… they told them what would happen”, said Lee. “The state expected the county supervisors to be the failsafe.” Lee said his company will never again get involved in cleansing voting rolls. ”
Florida has re-edited its felon list five times since 1998 to correct errors.
The first list DBT Online provided to the Division of Elections in April 2000 contained the names of 181,157 persons. Approximately 65,776 of those included on the first list were identified as felons.
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In May 2000, DBT discovered that approximately 8,000 names were erroneously placed on the exclusion list, mostly those of former Texas prisoners who were included on a DBT list that turned out never to have been convicted of more than a misdemeanor. Later in the month, DBT provided a revised list to the Division of Elections (DOE) containing a total of 173,127 persons. Of those included on the “corrected list”, 57,746 were identified as felons.
