Harris, Hood Gave State Flawed Felon Voter List
By Palm Beach Post Editorial
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
When it came to lost election data in Miami-Dade County — information that was nearly two years old — Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent in a team to make sure that local errors didn't make the state look bad. If only she had worried as much about the actions of her own Division of Elections.
Ms. Hood oversaw distribution of a faulty list meant to block felons who had not obtained clemency from voting. She wasted $150,000 trying to keep the list from being made public. Within weeks of its release, newspapers documented errors that made the state look as if it was trying to keep blacks, but not Hispanics, from voting. Ms. Hood dumped the list.
How did it get that far? Ms. Hood has asked her inspector general to investigate. The audit will have to start in 2001, when Ms. Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris, thwarted the Legislature's will to assure that her office would control the list.
The 2001 election reform law called for the list to be compiled by the Florida Association of Court Clerks, which had experience conducting similar database analysis. Then-Division of Elections chief Clay Roberts told legislators that the clerks wanted too much money, but memos published by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune showed that the clerks had agreed to do the work for the amount spelled out by the Legislature, $525,000 a year. Mr. Roberts' impossible-to-document explanation to the newspaper — that the group later made a verbal demand for more money — was denied by the clerks association.
But the Legislature bought it. Mr. Roberts hired Accenture, a Bermuda-based company that used to be called Andersen Consulting, a subsidiary of Arthur Andersen. It changed its name after the accounting firm became caught up in the Enron scandal. Accenture's lobbyists included former Jeb Bush aide Brian Yablonski and the law firm of Van Poole, a former state Republican chairman. Accenture gave $300,000 in campaign contributions, favoring Republicans two-to-one, the Herald-Tribune reported.
Mr. Roberts also decided to use race to match felons on one list with voters on another list, even though the felons list didn't offer Hispanic as a choice. The move guaranteed that Hispanics wouldn't make the list. This week, The Miami Herald reported that a state memo that Ms. Hood had ordered said, "It becomes apparent... that Accenture's Fayetteville office does not understand the relationship between the matching tables." Even though some state workers recognized the problems, Ms. Hood moved blithely forward, distributed the flawed list to county election officials in May and retracted it only after public scrutiny in July.
The state paid Accenture $1.8 million to compile the list. Katherine Harris told legislators that an audit of the list, costing $300,000, would be a waste of money. It turns out she was right. The newspapers did it for free.