Florida voting rolls contain dead people, duplicates, ineligible felons

CelticKing · Oct 30, 2008

Florida voting rolls contain dead people, duplicates, ineligible felons

Mattie Lee Blitch has been dead 23 years but she's still registered to vote in Palm Beach County.

Recent college graduate Brett Ackerman is registered three times in two counties.

And convicted felon Joseph Muro just signed up to vote — from a state mental institution for the criminally insane.

With balloting well under way in the general election, the Sun Sentinel found more than 65,000 ineligible and duplicate voters on Florida's registration rolls.

That includes at least 600 dead people, 32,000 voters registered more than once and a growing number of convicted felons — now more than 33,000 — who by law should not be allowed to cast ballots.

Political analysts say the potential for widespread fraud in the names of dead or duplicate voters is low, although dead voters did play a role in the 1997 Miami mayor's race. Ineligible felons, however, could influence a close election in a state that decided the 2000 presidential race by 537 votes.

Florida is not alone with its sloppy registrations, despite a federal law requiring states to keep accurate voter rolls. The Help America Vote Act required states to develop voter registration databases "largely in response to Florida in 2000 because, really, a good registration roll is the basis of a good election," said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline .org, operated by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

Florida has spent more than $22 million on its voter database, launched in 2006. The state Division of Elections is responsible for identifying duplicate and ineligible voters, and the counties are supposed to remove them. Elections officials at both levels acknowledge problems but blame each other.

They say massive voter-registration drives in a historic election have left little time to clean up the rolls. But the Sun Sentinel found officials make scant headway even in non-election lulls, with many ineligible voters remaining on the rolls for years.

Counties also handle removals in vastly different ways, with some purging thousands of voters each year and others removing only a few, records show.

"I think Florida has always presented, or at least since 2000, an environment that is ripe for lawsuits, and this certainly doesn't do anything to diminish that," Seligson said.

Felon voter surge
In the final five weeks before voter registration closed Oct. 6, Florida added more than 2,600 ineligible felons to the rolls.

That's on top of the more than 30,700 the Sun Sentinel previously identified as of the end of August.

In Florida, felons can vote only after their rights have been restored through clemency. The newspaper found the state checks felons' criminal histories and clemency status only after they register and had a backlog of 108,000 still to be reviewed.

At the Florida Civil Commitment Center in Arcadia, a psychiatric lockup for pedophiles and rapists, seven men registered in 2004 and remain on the voter rolls.

"We have 100 percent convicted felons who are also sex offenders, so nobody should be eligible," said Timothy Budz, center administrator.

Among the recently registered ineligible felons are Joseph Muro and another patient at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, home to people found mentally incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity.

Another man signed up three days after being released from prison in Palm Beach County.

One new felon voter listed a West Palm Beach Catholic charity for the homeless as his address. Among the crimes on his record: voter fraud.

Long dead
Mary Agnes Belden was surprised to learn her mother, Mattie Lee Blitch, is still registered to vote in Florida. The elementary school teacher always was an avid voter — before her death in Jacksonville in April 1985.

"I don't know why she would be [still registered] after all this time," said Belden, of Buford, Ga.

The state identifies dead voters through death certificates filed in Florida but has missed hundreds, often because they died in other states.

Two Broward County voters are still on the rolls eight years after they died, one while on vacation in Colorado and another in a California nursing home.

Some elections supervisors, including Mark Andersen of Bay County in the Panhandle, wait for official word from the state before removing a dead voter, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. "I could be standing at someone's funeral, and I am not going to come in and remove somebody," he said.

Double trouble
Brett Ackerman, 22, moved and changed his party affiliation after he first registered to vote in 2004. Instead of updating his record, elections officials issued him three registrations, two in Boynton Beach and the other in Gainesville, where he attended the University of Florida.

"If people can have multiple voting addresses, they can abuse the system," said Ackerman, who now lives in New York. "That is just wrong on so many levels."

A Barack Obama supporter, Ackerman said he plans to return to Florida and cast a ballot. "Just one vote, though," he said.

Duplicates are supposed to be weeded out on the front end when voters change their registrations. But thousands slip through as elections workers make data entry errors or don't check for previous records.

"It's sloppily done, and it's done in haste," said Pat Hollarn, elections supervisor in Okaloosa County in the Panhandle.

Among the duplicates are thousands of mostly women voters with two registrations at the same address under different last names. Elections supervisors say they likely married or divorced.

The state is unlikely to catch those duplicates; it looks only for voters with the same last name.

Non-citizens
An untold number of Florida's 1.8 million non-citizens are on the voting rolls. Non-citizens are not permitted to vote, but Florida has no way of checking citizenship.

Florida "does not have access to any federal database, if any exists, with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Department of Homeland Security," said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the state Elections Division.

Local election officials can — and do — remove non-citizens upon receiving "information from whatever reliable source," Krell Davis said.

But the numbers vary widely from county to county.

Broward has taken off 158 since 2006; Palm Beach County only 13.

In Miami-Dade County, where more than 623,000 people are not U.S. citizens, local elections officials removed 97 during that two-year period.

Hillsborough County, with half a million fewer non-citizens, removed nearly three times as many: 290.

Fraud risk
How much of a role Florida's problematic registrations will play in the election remains to be seen. Once non-citizens and ineligible felons are added to the rolls, elections officials have no way of preventing them from voting.

Casting a ballot in the name of a dead person would be more difficult. Such a voter would have to present a photo ID with the name of the deceased and a signature that matches the registration record.

It is possible for duplicate registrants to cast more than one ballot using different registrations, and poll workers have no way of catching them.

"I have my doubts that there will be any attempt to misuse the mistakes," said Roy Saltman, of Columbia, Md., an elections consultant and author on voting technology. "Somebody would have to deliberately want to."
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BLAZER PROPHET · Oct 30, 2008

A couple of elections ago I was at the polling place and they had an old forn from the 1940's that was supposed to be filled out and turned in to the feds in the event a registered voter dies. The only problem is, is that it was to be signed by the voter.

Haakzilla · Oct 30, 2008

Florida was already the scapegoat for fraud in 2000...Thank you Jeb and Daddy Bush!!!

Ohio was a bit suspect in 2004...

...and I have a feeling PA is going to be the biggest controversy in 2008's election!!!

MARIS61 · Oct 30, 2008

If I'm a dead person, I'm voting for McCain.

Just sayin'.

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Florida voting rolls contain dead people, duplicates, ineligible felons

CelticKing The Green Monster

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Florida voting rolls contain dead people, duplicates, ineligible felons

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CelticKing The Green Monster

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