Databases, Felons, and Voting: Errors and Bias in the Florida Felons Exclusion List in the 2000 Presidential Elections
This paper examines the production and use of the exclusion lists by the state, its private sector contractor, Database Technologies (DBT), and Florida’s 67 counties between 1998 and the 2000 elections. It places the exclusion lists in the context of the social and political structure of the United States and the state of Florida, and interprets its significance within that context. I provide a detailed accounting of the contents of the lists, identify ways in which the lists reveal weaknesses in Florida’s voter list maintenance procedures up to 2000, and identify the types of errors made and biases in the production and use of the lists. The three major findings of the analysis are: a) the 2000 felons’ exclusion list had a considerable number of errors in it, probably more than 25% of the names on the list were on there in error; b) these errors were racially biased, such that more African-American registered voters were on the list in error than either Whites or Latinos; and c) that the decentralized process by which the felons’ list was used to purge the voter rolls resulted in a sometimes judicious but sometimes partisan purging process – Democratic county supervisors were less likely to use the felons’ list than Republican ones, but even the latter found considerable, biased errors in the list.
Differential Punishing of African Americans and Whites Who Possess Drugs: A Just Policy or a Continuation of the Past?
Five African Americans in Minnesota were arrested and charged with possession of a cocaine base, known on the street as crack. The statute that they were charged under provided that possession of 3 or more grams of crack cocaine was a third-degree felony, punishable by up ta 20 years of incarceration, In addition, the same ; statute provided that possession of 10 grams or more of a cocaine powder was a third-degree felony. Less than 10 grams of cocaine powder was a fifth-degree felony, punishable by up to 5 years. In Hennepin County in 1988,97% of the persons m t e d for cocaine base or crack were African Americans, and 80% of the persons arrested for cocaine powder were White. I3ecausc of these statistics and differential punishments, the five African Americans contested the constitutionality of the statute, After hearing the presentation of the issues, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the challenge and ruled the statute unconstitutional (State v. Russell, 1991). . The issue of whether African Americans am punished more severely than are White Americans by the criminal justice system and whether the system is racist has bccn debated in the literature (Blumstein, 1982; Johnson, 1992, Peterson & Hagan, 1983). On one hand, some criminal justice professionals have called the
Changing Conceptions of Race: Toward an Account of Anomalous Findings of Sentencing Research
Theories based on static and simplistic conceptions of the social significance of race fail to account for anomalous research findings and confuse our understanding of race-related outcomes. To substantiate this argument, an analysis is presented of the effects of changing conceptions of race and drugs on sentencing outcomes during a modern anti-drug crusade. This crusade involved a compromise between conservative and liberal impulses in which "big dealers" were identified as villains, while middle-class youth and nonwhites (but the latter only insofar as they were rarely big dealers in a racially stratified drug trade) were reconceived as victims. The results of our contextualized analysis allow us to make sense of otherwise anomalous findings and suggest that while there may be a trend toward equality in American criminal sentencing, there are also patterns of differential leniency and severity that can only be revealed when changing conceptions of race and crime are taken into account.