Nearly 1,700 Felons Removed From Florida's Voter Rolls
Thursday, October 7, 2004 at 02:33PM
TheSpook
Nearly 1,700 felons have
been removed from the voter rolls in at least 32 Florida counties. Nine
counties have not removed any voters from their rolls in that period,
including Miami-Dade, the second-largest county with more than 1
million registered voters. The removals have come in the months since
the state scrapped a list of tens of thousands of potential felons to
be removed from the state's voter rolls. Florida is one of only a
handful of states that does not automatically restore voting rights to
convicted felons when they complete their sentence. The purge of felons
by election officials has been a hot-button issue since the 2000
presidential election, in which many citizens discovered at the polls
they weren't allowed to vote. In May, Secretary of State Glenda Hood
released a list of nearly 48,000 people identified as potential felons
who could be removed. The list was scrapped in July after it was
reported that it contained few people identified as Hispanic.
Supervisors were told to revert to their original procedure to remove
the felons, which was to act on information received from the local
clerk of courts. [
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Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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