In an effort to clean up one of its most notable and damaging messes,
the state asked election supervisors Friday to abandon efforts to purge
many potential felons from the voting rolls. Dawn Roberts, director of
the Division of Elections, sent a letter to all 67 counties telling
them to deny voters the right to cast ballots ``only if you have
independently confirmed that the person is a felon who has not had
their civil rights restored.'' The letter, released late in the day as
a hurricane ravaged the state, follows mediation sessions between the
state and the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, which alleged
that Florida violated federal and state voting rights law by using a
flawed list of 48,000 potential felons. Florida is one of only a
handful of states that bar ex-prisoners from voting unless they've had
their civil rights restored. In early May, Florida sent supervisors the
list of potential felons and asked county election offices to begin the
process to remove those on the list from the voting rolls. But
ultimately, state officials scrapped the list after news organizations,
including The Miami Herald and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, exposed flaws
in the list of felons. The biggest flaw in the state's database: It did
not include the names of Hispanic voters (who tend to vote Republican
in Florida), while it included many black voters (who tend to vote
Democrat in Florida)who had actually had their voting rights restored.[more ]
Hurricane causes 'significant loss of life' [more ]
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