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Leon supervisor wary of bill creating voter registration list
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A Senate committee Monday approved creation of a statewide voter-registration master list despite warnings from one elections supervisor that thousands of voters lose their rights every time the state tries to set up a new database. The bill (SB 2176) passed on a 4-1 vote and now goes to the Senate Governmental Oversight and Productivity Committee for hearings next month. Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said the state got so many complaints in 1998 that it told counties to stop using the database. In 2000, he said, "between 5,000 and 50,000 voters were disenfranchised" by inaccurate listings. Sancho, one of the more outspoken of Florida's 67 county election supervisors, told the committee that "since 1998 through 2004, we have not been error-free on elections" due to faulty list-keeping at the state level. "If you do this to one person out of 1,000 and you've destroyed the credibility of the process," said Sancho, a nonpartisan whose elected office is in Tallahassee. "We have a problem today with the credibility of our elections." He cited repeated attempts to purge convicted felons from registration rolls, which resulted in some county supervisors refusing to use lists provided by state election offices in Tallahassee because of numerous errors, the Tallahassee Democrat reported for Tuesday editions. Secretary of State Glenda Hood scrapped a purge list of felons last year because of thousands of inaccurate names on the list. Committee chairman Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, said the federal Help America Vote Act - enacted after Florida's 2000 presidential electoral meltdown - requires a statewide voter-registration system by Jan. 1. Posey's bill requires that the Secretary of State's office reviews the information and makes an initial determination whether it is credible and reliable. The bill also addresses uniform methods of compiling registration, party switches, address changes and other data at the county level. Originally published by The Associated Press [here]