Hunt For Fraudulent Voters Triggered Confusion, Anger BYLINE: Robert P. King Palm Beach Post Staff Writer DATE: 12-11-2000 PUBLICATION:

The Palm Beach Post EDITION: FINAL SECTION: Main_News PAGE: 1A

Two years ago, the state began a computerized hunt for felons and corpses on its voting rolls. But the search for fraudulent voters also:


Those in charge of the search say they or local election officials caught those errors before any damage occurred.

But as the glitches mounted, tempers grew short among state officials, election supervisors in several counties, and Database Technologies, the Boca Raton company being paid $4 million to compare Florida’s voter rolls with myriad other databases throughout the country.

Exasperated by the errors, election officials in some counties simply refused to use the company’s list of 173,142 potential felons and other ineligible voters, despite a 1998 state law commanding them to do so. The refuseniks included Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore.

In turn, state officials and their contractor exchanged snippy e- mailed comments about some counties’ election officials, according to public records obtained by The Palm Beach Post. They complained that the counties were filing needless information requests, handing out company workers’ phone numbers to angry voters, or generally “botching” procedures for verifying the data.

In the end, it’s unclear how many counties used the data that state taxpayers paid to collect, or how many thousands of people - correctly or incorrectly - lost their right to vote. But the state’s effort to clean up its voter lists, a reaction to Miami’s fraudulent mayoral election of 1997, has become one of the many disputes surrounding this year’s presidential race.

Some activists and lawmakers say the effort might have blocked legitimate voters, especially minorities, from casting ballots Nov. 7. Blacks make up a disproportionate number of Florida’s convicted felons, who are barred for life from voting unless the state restores their rights.

“This happens to be one more allegation to go with the numerous discrepancies that have now surfaced,” said U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar. But he acknowledged he has no proof that anyone was actually kept from voting last month because of incorrect data.

Mistakes are common any time government agencies mix information from separate computer databases, one privacy advocate said.

“I know it’s inconceivable to imagine a computer can make a mistake, but those errors have occurred,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. “An alias is confused with the actual identity. Two people have the same name but difference addresses.”

Still, one sponsor of the 1998 law defended the program, saying the identification of 170,000-plus ineligible voters “far outweighs any inconvenience.”

“It’s easy to talk about a mistake, that maybe some people had to go through an extra step, but most of the (election) supervisors worked it out,” said state Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Palm Harbor.

But tell that to people such as Norman Nickerson, one of numerous voters who complained that Database Technologies and the state had unfairly branded them.

“This company shouldn’t go around making accusations unless they can back them up,” said Nickerson, of St. Petersburg. “They left the burden on me to prove that I was innocent. That’s not the American way.”

Nickerson said he voted after convincing Pinellas County election officials that he was never convicted of a 30-year-old felony charge.

In e-mails to the state in July, a Database Technologies employee insisted that Nickerson’s name, birth date and Social Security number matched those from a felon in the state’s criminal database. The employee also complained that the Pinellas County Elections Office had given Nickerson her office phone number.

“The Supervisors and/or the staff should be calling us - not handing out my name and number to irate voters,” wrote the employee, Marlene Thorogood.

“This man was scary,” she continued. “There are just some people that feel when you mess with their ‘right to vote,’ you’re messing with their life.”

“Yes, I was annoyed,” Nickerson acknowledged. “Why don’t they simply find out the truth?”

Florida Elections Supervisor Clay Roberts acknowledged that the computer search wasn’t perfect, but said, “It is a tool to remove felons and it’s a tool we didn’t have before.”

A spokesman for ChoicePoint, an Atlanta-area company that bought Database Technologies in May, said last week that it had done exactly what its contract required: The company identified people who might be ineligible to vote. Then, it was the counties’ job to verify the information and give voters a chance to challenge the data.

The most publicized glitch was the company’s admission last summer that it had identified nearly 8,000 people as felons when they had been convicted of misdemeanors. The company blamed inaccurate data from Texas and said it quickly corrected the error.

But other, less-publicized errors accumulated, fueled by the difficulty of matching 8 million registered voters against multiple databases throughout the country - with no certain way of telling whether the John H. Smith in Florida is the same John H. Smith who robbed a convenience store in Montana.

“Voters don’t have to give their Social Security numbers, so all we really have is their name and date of birth and their signature,” said Pam Iorio, elections supervisor in Hillsborough County and president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.

ChoicePoint has access to other data on voters, such as credit agencies’ information on where people have lived. Still, confusion can occur, and many errors were not caught until the county election supervisors sent notification letters to people on the list.

Take Brenda J. Brown - both of them.

Both black. Both 5 feet 4 inches. Both born March 4, 1950. Both with previous addresses in Ohio.

The problem: One was a convicted felon. The other, a voter in Clay County, wasn’t.

“This would be the MOST incredible false positive I have seen in over 3 years of doing this research,” Thorogood of Database Technologies wrote in an e-mail in June.

The search also turned up a Robert Williams in Liberty County with the same name and birth date (Feb. 6, 1976) as a felon in Washington state - and two other Robert Williams’s with that birth date in Iowa and Kentucky.

The mayor of one Gilchrist County town also incorrectly wound up on the list of possible felons, according to state records.

Even within Florida, information on felons is divided between at least two executive branch agencies: the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which keeps information on convictions, and the Office of Executive Clemency, which lists those who have had their rights restored. In some cases, the alleged convictions were decades old, the documentation hard to find.

Some agencies were more fastidious than others in checking their data.

For instance, the Florida state agency that tracks births and deaths often seemed to mix up Marion County (Ocala) and Monroe County (the Keys), the company discovered.

It also found that in Florida and at least four other states, prisoner files sometimes contained “conviction dates” that were actually other dates, such as the future day when an inmate is set to be released. That meant that, to all appearances, people were being listed for felonies yet to occur.

Even as the company, the state and the counties looked for mistakes, they sometimes clashed.

FDLE officials complained that Duval County made no attempt to verify any information on the felon list before sending notices to voters, creating “confusion.” But the FDLE also said some counties were asking for too much information before sending the letters, or quizzing the department for data it doesn’t have.

Meanwhile, some counties, including Hillsborough, annoyed Database Technologies employees by sending them the paperwork from voters who complained about incorrect data.

The pique even extended to mocking the name of Gary Klunk, an employee in Iorio’s Hillsborough County office whose handling of the list was irking the state.

“Apparently ‘her’ letter was a ‘Klunker,’ “ wrote Jeffrey Long, an FDLE bureau chief, to state Elections Division attorney Bucky Mitchell in August.

In an earlier message, Mitchell complained: “Gary Klunk in her office continues to botch the felony verification process.”

After seeing the correspondence, Iorio said the rancor suprised her.

“The felon process that we followed was completely thorough and on target,” Iorio said. “We acted as the middleman trying to work out problems.”

Database Technologies was the only applicant for the state contract in 1998. The law passed that year required the Elections Division to farm the data search out to a private company, and then required the county election supervisors to remove ineligible voters from their rolls.

The law was a reaction to the 1997 Miami mayoral election, which Xavier Suarez briefly won with help from fraudulent votes from felons, out-of-town residents and people using the names of those who had died.

Cleansing the voting registration lists was supposed to keep ineligible people from voting, while reducing the number of inactive names that people can use to vote under assumed identities.

“We didn’t feel there was an adequate database by the Division of Elections to do this,” said state Sen. Latvala, one of the bill’s sponsors. “There are a lot of companies that massage data, and they have big databases.”

At the time, Database Technologies was one of the country’s biggest compilers of computerized information on tens of millions of residents, specializing in state and local government records. ChoicePoint, Database Technologies’ new owner, is a spinoff of the Atlanta-based credit reporting agency Equifax Corp.

“Even one fraudulent vote is too many,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor who has written about election fraud. “It reduces support for the system and it increases cynicism



An example of a county official going her own way could be found in Osceola

County.


Puerto Ricans and new Hispanic citizens have moved by the tens of thousands

to Osceola and the rest of central Florida in recent years. Federal law

requires ballots to be printed in two languages in any county in which

voting-age citizens with English-language deficiencies make up at least 5

percent of the population. Miami-Dade and seven other Florida counties have

printed bilingual ballots for years.


But in Osceola, where 29 percent of residents are Hispanic,Elections

Supervisor Donna Bryant refused to print ballots in two languages, helping to

trigger an inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department. Investigators want to know

whether the lack of bilingual ballots and the paucity of Spanish-speaking

poll workers interfered with residents' ability to vote.


Bryant said she chose not to print Spanish ballots because of the expense and

hassle, and because "we haven't been ordered by the U.S. Justice Department."

U.S. officials say many counties print ballots in Spanish without federal

prompting.


Armando Rivera, vice chairman of the Osceola Democratic Party, spoke of

confusion in heavily Hispanic precincts, where Democratic voters

significantly outnumbered Republicans. "It was a disaster," he said. "County

officials were ill-prepared and didn't have enough Hispanic poll workers."


Rivera said many Spanish-speaking voters complained of uncertainty about the

ballot. Dozens of voters, he said, lost their votes when they marked ballots

once for Democrat Al Gore and again for Libertarian Party candidate Harry

Browne, whose name appeared in the slot just below Gore and vice presidential

candidate Joseph I. Lieberman.


Why? Rivera said they confused "Libertarian" and "Lieberman."


The Florida ballot proved confusing to plenty of English speakers as well.

Whether it was the Palm Beach butterfly ballot or the "wraparound" ballots

that spread the presidential candidates across two columns, voters by the

thousands cast votes for two candidates, invalidating their ballots.


A complicating factor was the instruction in the presidential section of all

Florida ballots to "Vote for Group." Even elections officials differ on the

meaning of that phrase, disputing whether it meant to vote for a two-member

presidential ticket or for Florida's 25-member slate of presidential electors.


The origins of the two-column ballots varied, with county supervisors having

the final say. Much of the controversy has focused on Palm Beach, where

supervisor Theresa LePore designed the infamous butterfly ballot to

accommodate large type for elderly voters. Gore likely lost about 6,500 votes

there as a result of voter error or confusion, an analysis by The Post shows.


Less well-known, however, is the role of the secretary of state's office in

developing a ballot that some voters found to be confusing. Florida law

requires the office to dispatch "the format of the ballot" to all 67

supervisors of elections. The wraparound version sent by Harris's staff

featured the 10-candidate presidential race stretched across two columns.


The Houston-based printer for at least a dozen counties used the state sample

as a model. Vice President Bill Stotesbery of Hart InterCivic said the firm's

designers tried "to get it as close as possible to the sample ballot."


Voter error was unusually high in a number of the counties that used the

wraparound ballot. Studies show that a disproportionate number of voters

mistakenly voted for two candidates, one from each column.


Software Glitch


One of the greatest frustrations for voters on Election Day was being told by

poll workers that they were not registered. A significant culprit was the

haphazard operation of the state's motor-voter laws, designed to allow

citizens to register when they obtained or renewed driver's licenses.


Since 1995, Florida's motor vehicles agency has processed 570,000 new voter

registration forms a year. Balky computer software created numerous errors on

application forms, according to state officials.


Attention to detail varied widely. Staffers sometimes failed to complete the

forms. In the Tampa area, certain motor vehicle offices did not obtain

required voter signatures on 1 of every 15 forms. Other prospective voters

may not have realized that a separate application was required.


In countless cases last year, elections supervisors said, the agency failed

to deliver new voter information to the counties in time for the election.


"We never got the forms. Under the law, they're not registered to vote," Leon

County supervisor Ion Sancho said. "It was not a good experience."


Second Chance -- for Some


In some precincts with optical-scan ballots, those who voted twice in the

same race were rescued by machines programmed to reject such ballots and give

voters a second chance. But not all counties with such ballots possessed the

equipment, and not all counties with the equipment used it on Election Day.


Escambia and Manatee counties possessed the second-chance capability but

deactivated it. Escambia Supervisor Bonnie Jones said, "People should be able

to mark their vote correctly." She said giving voters a chance to correct

mistakes "increases the cost of an election," because ballots cost 25 cents

apiece.


"Maybe that was a bad judgment call," Jones mused. "Who's to say?"


The state provided no guidelines, Roberts said. "The statutes were silent on

the issue."


In the 24 optical-scan counties that gave voters a second chance, only one

ballot in 167 was invalidated -- .6 percent. In the 15 counties in which the

technology did not exist, one ballot in 17 was rejected -- 5.7 percent.


The 24 punch-card counties, all of which lacked the second-chance capability,

had a rejection rate of 1 in 25 -- 3.9 percent.


As many as 120,000 Florida ballots could have been corrected by voters if

every county had employed modern machines with second-chance technology.


When George W. Bush's narrow lead triggered the immediate statewide recount

on Nov. 8, Harris and the elections staff did not make clear what county

supervisors should do.


"That was one point in the process where the division needed to step in and

say, 'This is what should be done,' " said Iorio, the Hillsborough elections

supervisor who also leads the state association of elections chiefs.


Florida election code requires a recount when the margin between candidates

is less than .5 percent, but some supervisors felt the statute was unclear.

Instead of recounting, officials in the 18 counties simply checked the

counting mechanisms on their voting machines to determine whether the numbers

matched the official Nov. 7 results.


Two years earlier, the issue seemed settled. In April 1999, Division of

Elections Director Ethel Baxter wrote Manatee County Elections Supervisor Bob

Sweat in simple terms: "It is our opinion that 'recount' means to count

again."


Baxter's letter was not binding in other counties, and thus supervisors felt

free to ignore her opinion. Nor did Harris or Roberts take steps to ensure

uniform procedures. Asked why the elections office took no steps to ensure

uniform procedures, Roberts said that supervisors knew state officials

believed recounts should be performed. He cited the 1999 opinion and a

discussion at a conference of supervisors last summer.


Sweat, at least, conducted a recount, running all of Manatee's 111,676

ballots through machines on Nov. 8. Gore gained four votes.


Overlooking the Deadline


Matthew Hendrickson, a sailor aboard the cruiser USS Ticonderoga, mailed his

overseas absentee ballot from Puerto Rico on Nov. 13, six days after the

Election Day deadline. He knew the presidential race was undecided and he

wanted Bush to win. Records show that Duval County included his vote in its

results.


"I dropped it off at the mailbox," Hendrickson said in an interview. "I was

just seeing if it would count or not."


At the time of the election, Florida law was explicit: To count, a ballot

must be dated and postmarked by Election Day. It must be witnessed by another

person, and the voter must have formally requested the ballot.


Some counties, including Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, followed the law to the

letter, while others tallied ballots that lacked postmarks or failed to meet

other requirements. This was particularly true in north Florida, home to

several large military bases, where officials responded to GOP arguments that

military ballots often aren't postmarked, mailed or delivered on time.


At least 17 ballots examined by The Post in four north Florida counties were

counted despite bearing postmarks dated after Nov. 7. Scores more were

counted after arriving without postmarks in elections offices between Nov. 8

and Nov. 17, the deadline for overseas absentee ballots to be received. Electi

on watchers note there is no way to know when ballots without postmarks were

completed.


When elections officers opened the envelopes on Nov. 17, lawyers for George

W. Bush said it was unfair to enforce the technicalities of state law against

America's fighting men and women. Under pressure, Democrats decided not to

challenge ballots that lacked required features.


The result was a rout of the Democrats in the northern counties, where Bush

picked up 176 votes that lacked postmarks and other required features.


Elsewhere, particularly in Democratic counties, canvassing boards saw things

the opposite way -- as did the Bush forces, who demanded that strict state

rules be followed. In overwhelmingly Democratic Broward County, elections

officials rejected 304 overseas ballots for various technical reasons,

including 119 because they lacked postmarks, Democrats said. Miami-Dade

invalidated about 200; Volusia threw out 43 and Orange 117. All three

counties voted Democratic.


After counties reached their conflicting decisions, U.S. District Judge Lacey

A. Collier ruled on Dec. 8 that officials in several jurisdictions must count

ballots even if they lacked foreign postmarks or if the voter had not

formally requested an absentee ballot.


Manatee supervisor Sweat recalled the tense moments when overseas ballots

were being studied in Bradenton. Democratic observers challenged "anything

they could," he recalled, until he advised them to look more closely at the

unopened ballot envelopes.


He showed them the place on the pre-printed mailing labels that identified

the voters' party identification. Contrary to standards of fairness,

elections officials in Manatee and Okaloosa counties knew voters' political

affiliation before deciding whether their votes would count.


At no point did state officials try to bring order to the chaos. "We do not,"

said Roberts, "have authority to tell county supervisors to do anything."