Voting booths | Tony Dejak/AP Photo
TALLAHASSEE — A top Florida elections official testified in federal court on Monday that as many as 85,000 voters might be ineligible to cast ballots in the battleground state, but it could take years for the state to figure out who should be removed from the voting rolls.
Maria Matthews, director of the state Division of Elections, said the state has flagged thousands of voters who have been convicted of a felony. The voters might be serving a prison sentence or have convictions for murder or sex offenses that would make them ineligible to vote under Amendment 4, a measure that ended the state's lifetime ban on voting for most people who have served time for felonies.
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A potential purge of voters in Florida, which has more than 13.7 million registered voters, could have out-sized impact, because many elections are won or lost on narrow margins. President Donald Trump won Florida in 2016 by fewer than 113,000 votes.
Florida voters approved Amendment 4 in 2018. In 2019, the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature passed a law that required former felons to pay any outstanding restitution, fees or fines ordered by a judge before they can regain their right to vote. Civil rights groups and voting advocates have sued to challenge the law.
Matthews was put on the stand by attorneys for the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. She spent hours explaining how the state has responded to the law. During her testimony, as she described procedures used by the state to flag ineligible voters, she acknowledged that state officials were working on a backlog of voters who had been flagged as potentially ineligible.
Florida has adapted its voter purging process over the years after previous felon voting purges — including one ahead of the 2000 presidential election — have drawn fierce criticism for errors.
Under the process, the state matches names on the voting rolls to other databases to determine if a voter is a convicted felon. Names that are matched are then subjected to further review that includes gathering information on the crime. The state eventually sends a file to local election supervisors, who make the final decision whether to purge a person from voting rolls.
Matthews said the state has the capacity to review an average of 57 voter files a day, meaning it could take four years for the state to review all the files of the estimated 85,000 former felons registered to vote.
Some files are processed faster than others, but her office is understaffed, Matthews said.
Her testimony was revealing because Florida hasn’t begun to review whether people who have registered to vote since January 2019, when Amendment 4 took effect, have outstanding court debts that would make them ineligible under the 2019 law.
Florida has been tinkering with the process and is only now beginning to finalize it. Matthews said she had “grand aspirations” that they would begin sending information about potentially ineligible voters to local supervisors in May or June, but the coronavirus pandemic and other problems have made it difficult to meet that timeline.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle asked when the state would have a process in place to review outstanding financial obligations.
The state will move ahead when she is “comfortable” with the final process, Matthews said.
“I really take this very seriously,” she told the judge. “I don’t want to send something down that we say is valid and it’s not.”
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85,000 voters could be removed from Florida rolls - POLITICO
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