Under orders from Harris’s office, DBT provided matches of anyone with a close name. Thus, for example, John Jackson is a black man who had served time in Texas, so Johnny Jackson Jr., a black man in Florida with the same birth date, was purged from the registration rolls. [SUP]
[6][/SUP] DBT used lists of former felons that included names and birth dates and race, but counted as a “match” names that were only approximate. DBT specifically wrote Harris’s office to say that their name-match criteria would include a large number of nonfelons, and Harris’s office advised them in writing to lower the name-match criterion further to 85%. All told, DBT generated a list of 82,389 voters to purge from registries. [SUP]
[7][/SUP] DBT subsequently tried to defend their lists by claiming they were 85% accurate. [SUP]
[8][/SUP] But that would still mean that well over 10,000 mostly minority, poor, and Democratic Floridians were illegally disenfranchised — more than twenty times Bush’s margin of victory in the state. Plus, where verification was attempted, the accuracy of the list was nowhere near 85%. Officials in Leon County, Florida, tried to verify the 694 names on the list from Tallahassee and found only 34 to be a match—a 5% accuracy rate. [SUP]
[9][/SUP] Robert E. Pierre reported in the Washington Post that responsibility for this faulty voter purge lies with Harris’s office, not DBT:
From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. ... “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches,” said Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, who headed the state purge effort, in a March 1999 e-mail to Database Technologies product manager Marlene Thorogood, who had warned him of possible mistakes. ... Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, confirmed the policy. ... “The decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.” “We warned them,” said James E. Lee, vice president of communications for the company. “The list was exactly what the state wanted. They said, ‘The counties will verify the information, so you don’t have to.’” [SUP][10][/SUP]