Glitch tells hundreds in Florida they are felons

By Marcia Gelbart, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau Thursday, June 22, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- With less than five months left before November's presidential election, hundreds of Palm Beach County and Treasure Coast residents came within a few erroneous keystrokes this week of losing their voting rights.

A computer error by a Boca Raton company that has a $4 million contract with the state Division of Elections mistakenly singled out thousands of Floridians -- including 472 in Palm Beach County and 185 from the Treasure Coast -- as felons in Texas and a few other states. No Floridian convicted of a felony can vote unless his voting rights are restored by the Office of Executive Clemency.

Initially, 11,986 people were tagged with out-of-state felony convictions. But after the mishap was realized, following angry complaints from people erroneously identified as muggers, burglars and car thieves, 7,972 people were removed from that list.

"I understand it can be a shocking thing as a citizen to say we've identified you as a possible felon. But we're not accusing anybody of anything," said Clayton Roberts, director of the Division of Elections. "We are legitimately trying to remove people from the voter rolls who shouldn't be voting."

Martin County Elections Supervisor Peggy Robbins said her office has been receiving complaints about incorrect felony notices since early last year.

"The first time was really bad. It's improved over time, but it's still not perfect," Robbins said.

The main problem Robbins noticed was that the state sent notices to people with the same name as someone else who had committed a felony.

In the last batch of mailings, Robbins made sure the letters encouraged residents to report incorrect information.

"We've been much more particular in what the letters say," she said. "We now say 'supposedly.' "

Spurred in part by cases of dead people's names being used for voting in Miami's 1998 elections, legislators subsequently beefed up state election laws to clean up voting rolls. The state hired Database Technologies, with headquarters on Blue Lake Drive, to analyze various computer files and identify people who register in more than one county, those who have died, or those who are felons.

To do so, the company -- whose contracts with the FBI were suspended in 1999 because of suspected ties of the company founder to drug smugglers -- has access to various federal, state and local agency databases, including those from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Other company contracts include processing data to help find missing children and solving homicides.

In 1999, Database Technologies carried out the first part of its four-year Division of Elections contract. But mistakes soon were discovered in data it processed from the Florida Department of Corrections. That led state elections officials to ask Florida's 67 county elections supervisors to temporarily hold off on mailing letters that said it appeared the residents were felons and could not vote.

That warning was later lifted, but fearful of problems, Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore put her list in a box and kept it there.

LePore on Wednesday said she has not sent out any letters this year and suggested she is likely to shun the new list as well, given the similar near-miss earlier. This time, the problem stemmed largely from Texas state records that erroneously included people with misdemeanors as having felonies.

George Bruder, a senior vice president of Database Technologies, attributed the error to "a miscommunication," saying Texas had changed a format in its data entry. "We were not aware of it."

The company has since ran new lists, without the misdemeanors, which were mailed to county supervisors Friday.

"We spend a lot of money on a lot of things in government," said Roberts, the Elections Division director. "Ensuring the integrity of our voter rolls would seem like a high priority government issue."

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 22, 2000