- Originally published in the Miami Herald on October 17, 2004 [here
]
Gov. Jeb Bush disputed a claim that he ignored advice to 'pull the plug' in May on a list to purge felons from voter rolls.
BY GARY FINEOUT, DAVID KIDWELL AND LESLEY CLARK
gfineout@herald.com
TALLAHASSEE - Gov. Jeb Bush denied Saturday that he ignored the advice of state election officials to ''pull the plug'' on a controversial list the state was using to remove convicted felons from the voter rolls.
Florida eventually scrapped the list in July, but only after news organizations, including The Herald, found deep flaws in how the list was put together. The Herald found that people who had their voting rights restored were on the list, while The Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that the list had virtually no Hispanic felons on it.
In its Saturday edition, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that a May e-mail from a Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert to his supervisor said that Paul Craft, a top Division of Elections employee, had recommended to Bush that the state scrap the controversial list of 48,000 felons. Craft works under Secretary of State Glenda Hood and was responsible for putting together the list.
'The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're `going live' with it this weekend,'' Jeff Long wrote in an May 4 e-mail obtained by the newspaper after a public-records request.
Bush told The Herald on Saturday that the Herald-Tribune story was wrong.
''It's not true,'' Bush said. ``I didn't say it.''
Bush made a similar denial to ABC News in an interview to be televised this morning.
''When I became aware of the problems with the felon list, I told the secretary of state to pull the plug,'' Bush said. ``I didn't have knowledge three months before that decision in May.''
A spokesman for the governor also said Saturday that Bush never met or talked with Craft about the felon list in May.
Ed Kast, who was director of the Division of Elections at the time, said Saturday that no one in his office made any recommendation to Bush to scrap the list with his approval or knowledge.
Democratic politicians and liberal groups on Saturday seized upon the e-mail as evidence that Bush is using his office to help his brother, President Bush, get reelected because thousands of people on the felon list are blacks, who are more likely to vote Democratic.
''Today's report that the president's brother personally overruled the objections of state officials and ordered the state to move forward with a flawed felon purge list is the most disturbing evidence yet that the Bush campaign will go to any length to win this election,'' said U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat.
Sen. John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, also cited the flawed list during a visit to Miami-Dade on Saturday.
Florida is one of a handful of states that bans ex-prisoners from voting unless they apply to have their civil rights restored.
State legislators in 2001 agreed to spend up to $2 million to create a central voter database that is supposed to weed out felons, dead people and duplicate registrations from the state's list of nearly 10 million voters.
In May that list was sent to election supervisors, who were ordered to remove suspected felons from the voting rolls.
In July, Kast and his successor, Dawn Roberts, acknowledged their offices' frustration with myriad problems with the database company Accenture, which was hired to develop the felon list.
A May 2 internal memo, ordered by their boss, Hood, detailed a half-dozen missed deadlines and broken promises, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems.
Craft, who did not return a telephone message left at his home on Saturday, headed the team that wrote the internal memo.
Herald staff writer Matt Pinzur contributed to this report, which also was supplemented with material from The Associated Press.