Case study: Data crunch in Florida ballots
Use of databases to purge voter rolls led to complaints of people being wrongly excluded.
Case study: Data crunch in Florida ballots
Photo by Ken White
Not our problem
More than 170,000 names suspected of being duplicates or those of convicted felons were eliminated from Florida's voting rolls in 2000. Civil-rights advocates complained that some eligible voters got caught up in this shuffle and were denied the right to vote.The list was compiled by Database Technologies (DBT), now a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. The company says it was only hired to flag possible problems with the voter rolls and that local officials were supposed to check its results.
Civil-liberties groups say this is a prime example of why putting too much reliance on error-prone databases can be dangerous.
Case study: Data crunch in Florida ballots
Photo by Ken White
Not our problem
More than 170,000 names suspected of being duplicates or those of convicted felons were eliminated from Florida's voting rolls in 2000. Civil-rights advocates complained that some eligible voters got caught up in this shuffle and were denied the right to vote.The list was compiled by Database Technologies (DBT), now a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. The company says it was only hired to flag possible problems with the voter rolls and that local officials were supposed to check its results.
Civil-liberties groups say this is a prime example of why putting too much reliance on error-prone databases can be dangerous.
Florida by the numbers
• Bush votes: 2,912,790• Gore votes: 2,912,253
• Voter turnout: 70 percent
• Total number of names removed from voter rolls: 173,127
• Amount paid to DBT: $3.2 million
Sources: ChoicePoint, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Palm Beach County Public Safety Department.