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.
Challenging Criminal Disenfranchisement Under the Voting Rights Act: A New Strategy
Just a few decades after the Civil War, Southern conservatives gathered at state constitutional conventions and codified a growing white backlash against Reconstruction generally and black suffrage in particular.' Racial animus was rarely masked: "Discrimination!" one Virginia delegate exclaimed. "[T]hat, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for.., with a view to the elimination of every negro voter .... 2 The conventions adopted a panoply of voting barriers, including literacy and property tests,3 poll taxes,4 understanding clauses,5 and grandfather clauses.6 The purpose of these voting
Racism on Trial: New Evidence to Explain the Racial Composition of Prisons in the United States
In 1926, the federal government began keeping annual records of the number of admissions to state prisons.' That year, about one in four persons entering state prisons was black while only one in every eleven persons in the United States was black (Table 1). Since then, the gap between the percentage of blacks in the United States and the percentage of blacks entering state prisons has grown. In 1982, the most recent year for which national data on prison admissions is available, nearly one in every two persons entering adult state prisons was black while one in every nine persons in the United States was black.