Jeb Bush's secret weapon

94,000 people on a voter "purge" list -- half of them African-American -- continue to be banned from voting in Florida, even though the state knows the list is wildly inaccurate.

By Greg Palast

Nov. 1, 2002 | In December 2000, we reported that Florida's use of a faulty and politically questionable list of felons and dead people "scrubbed" from voter rolls -- half of them African-Americans -- may have cost Al Gore the 537-vote margin of victory claimed by George W. Bush in Florida.

Fast-forward two years. There's another close race in Florida. This time, younger brother Jeb is fighting to fend off a challenge from Bill McBride for the governor's race. The Nov. 5 face-off could again come down to thousands, if not hundreds, of votes.

And even though the list has been widely condemned -- the company that created it admits probable errors -- the same voter scrub list, with more than 94,000 names on it, is still in operation in Florida. Moreover, DBT Online, which generated the disastrously flawed list, reports that if it followed strict criteria to eliminate those errors, roughly 3,000 names would remain -- and a whopping 91,000 people would have their voting rights restored.

Eventually the list will be fixed, state officials have promised, in accordance with a settlement with the NAACP in its civil rights suit against Florida following the 2000 election. But not until the beginning of next year -- and after Jeb Bush's reelection bid is long over.

Florida is the only state to have paid a private company to "cleanse" voter rolls. The state signed a $4 million contract with DBT in 1998 (since 1999 a division of ChoicePoint of Atlanta) to create the scrub list, called the central voter file, which was mandated by a 1998 state voter-fraud law. That followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after an election in which ballots were cast in the names of dead people. The voter-fraud law required all 67 counties to purge duplicate registrations and deceased voters from voter registries, in addition to removing felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

DBT was instructed to list all voters whose names, birth dates, genders and races closely (but not exactly) matched those of ex-felons throughout the United States. But those matches were purposefully broad -- and imprecise.

During congressional hearings in April 2001, ChoicePoint vice president James Lee testified that the company had warned Florida election officials that the results would not be completely accurate. "DBT told state officials that the rules for creating this list would mean a significant number of people who weren't dead, who weren't registered in [in a Florida county], and who were not convicted felons would be included on the list," Lee said, adding that while "DBT made a lot of suggestions to the state on ways to reduce the number of eligible voters on that list," he quoted a Florida official who told them that they "want[ed] to capture more names that possibly aren't matches" and let the county supervisors determine if they were the right person or not.

Since that experience, ChoicePoint has gone out of the business of scrubbing lists. Lee said that "although we had been approached by other states to perform similar work, ChoicePoint has declined to perform voter registration for other states" because "when comes to performing work which may impact a person's right to vote, we are not confident that any of the methods that are used today will guarantee that the legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote."

Florida, however, seems to have decided to keep using those methods. Even when they're laughably inaccurate.

The state's list, most of which has been obtained and reviewed by Salon, contains such alleged criminals as Thomas Cooper, whose inclusion on the list represents either the dawning of a "Minority Report"-era of predicting criminal behavior -- or a glaring error. According to the list, Cooper is listed as a felon convicted on Jan. 30, 2007. In all, the list includes more than 400 people whose crimes were apparently committed in the future. More than 8,000 on the list have no conviction date at all. And eight, remarkably, appear to have been convicted before they were even born.

Next page: Blacks -- and Democrats -- suffer the worst