State officials order local elections supervisors to begin purging voter rolls of felons who don't have the right to vote. The measure may affect as many as 40,000 voters.
BY GARY FINEOUT
gfineout@herald.com
TALLAHASSEE - Six months before a presidential election that is again expected to be decided by a narrow margin in Florida, state officials ordered local election supervisors Wednesday to begin purging voter rolls of felons -- a move that may take as many as 40,000 people off the rolls, many of them likely to be black Democrats.
The state Division of Elections is turning the list over to local election supervisors in all 67 counties, and has ordered them to make sure to remove any felons whose voting rights have not been restored. The state says a preliminary check shows as many as 40,000 former felons are still registered to vote.
''As part of our quality assurance testing, felon and clemency information was run against a copy of the current voter registration database and has identified over 40,000 potential felon matches statewide,'' wrote Ed Kast, director of the state Division of Elections, in a memo sent out to election supervisors on Wednesday.
The issue of felon voting became controversial after the contested 2000 presidential election, when critics said Florida used out-of-state lists to purge former felons, taking voting rights away from people who had committed crimes outside the state but had had their voting rights restored in those other states.
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