Флорида дауыс берушілер тізімі: дау мен құқық бұзушылықтар тарихы

The Florida Central Voter File was an internal list of legally eligible voters used by the US Florida Department of State Division of Elections to monitor the official voter lists maintained by the 67 county governments in the State of Florida between 1998 and January 1, 2006. The exclusion of eligible voters from the file was a central part of the controversy surrounding the US presidential elections in 2000, which hinged on results in Florida. The 'Florida Central Voter File' was replaced by the Florida Voter Registration System on January 1, 2006, when a new federal law, the Help America Vote Act, came into effect.

At the time, Florida was the only state that paid a private company to purge the voter file of ineligible voters, in effect allowing a private company to make the administrative decision of who is not eligible to vote. The State of Florida's Division of Elections was required to contract with a private entity to purge its voter file by chapter 98.0975 of the Florida statutes, which had been enacted by the Florida legislature to address voter registration fraud found during the 1997 Miami mayoral election. Previously, voter purging had been conducted (sometimes controversially) by local elections officials. During the Civil Rights Movement, local election officials in southern states including Florida were the subjects of lawsuits, marches and civil disobedience as African Americans attempted to register to vote. This led to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, banning discriminatory practices that kept African Americans off the voter rolls. The first firm hired in 1998 to purge the voter rolls was Professional Service Inc., which charged $5,700 for the job. Later the same year, the state placed an open request for tenders to bid for the job. The contract was assigned to DBT Online, despite the fact that its bid had the highest price. The state gave the job to DBT for a first year fee of US$2,317,800; total fees eventually reached US$4 million. The Florida Department of Elections terminated Professional Service Inc.'s contract in 1999. DBT Online was acquired by ChoicePoint in early 2000 (itself acquired in 2008 by RELX′s LexisNexis Risk Solutions).

At first, Florida specified only exact matches on names, birthdates and genders to identify voters as felons. However, state records reveal a memo dated March 1999 from Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for the state elections office who was supervising the felon purge, asking DBT to loosen its criteria for acceptable matches. When DBT representatives warned Mitchell that this would yield a large proportion of false positives (mismatches), Mitchell's reply was that it would be up to each county elections supervisor to deal with the problem. In a February 2001 phone conversation with the BBC's London studios, ChoicePoint vice president James Lee said that the state "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon".

On 17 April 2001, James Lee testified before the McKinney panel that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90% of a last name. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non felons).

According to the Palm Beach Post (among other issues), though blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida's voters.

At the time of the election, a purge list contained a number of false positives—people identified as felons who were not actually felons. Skeptical of the list's accuracy, elections supervisors in 20 counties (including Palm Beach) ignored it altogether, thereby allowing thousands of felons to vote. DBT had decided in March 1999 not to include felon lists from South Carolina or Texas, which automatically restore voting rights, but that was overruled by the head of the Florida Office of Executive Clemency, Janet Keels, who ordered inclusion of any felon who did not have a written order of clemency, even from these states, wrongly placing 996 voters on the felon list. Florida did not restore their voting rights until three months after the election. Additionally, a number of persons listed as felons had been convicted of misdemeanors only, and therefore were eligible by law. Greg Palast, who has investigated this issue and identified occurrences of these problems, provides a sample of 23 names as they appear on the Florida 2000 felons list, with five examples of these erroneous listings highlighted (this represents a minimum rate of inaccuracy of 22% in this sample). Thomas Cooper, the second one in the list, was listed as being convicted on January 30, 2007.