Florida election and prisoner names

Factual Questions
1

Talking to a work colleague a few days ago, I was told that in the last USA election, the state of Florida removed all prisoners names from the electoral roll.

However … not only the names of prisoners were removed, but also those people that had the same names as prisoners. Maybe it was just surnames.

If that were the case, you would think there wouldn’t be many people left on the roll.

Is this a myth or is it true? Sounds like a myth to me, but funny things happen.

2

There were cases where a legitimate attempted voter signed up and was told they could not vote because of a felony in their past (FL keeps the right to vote away from felons even after their release and completion of punishment, unless they petition the state to have it returned). Turns out the names were the same, or similar. There were not millions of these cases, but perhaps hundreds. And in the 2000 Presidential Election, the phone number to call to get that cleared up was not very accessible, and many people were turned away, wrongly.

Florida couldn’t vote itself out of a paper bag.

3

Check out Stupid White Men by Michael Moore. He mentions this and gives a nice dumbed down version of what really went down in the last presidential election.

4

Here is a more or less unbiased source from ABC:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/floridafelonvote_010321.html

This one from a source on the left:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&s=palast

This one from a source on the right:

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/articles/03-12-01/carney.html

My yahoo search yahoo search came up with many other hits.

5

The key paragraphs from the ABC News story linked above:

6

Thanks very much for that. I will check out the M Moore video too.

My googling only give me non-related rubbish.

7

Wow, I did not know that ex-convicts were also not allowed to vote.

I should have used the word ‘felon’ (sounds like a cats claw) in my search.

8

Check the Salon archives also. There’s a follow-up article. A year or more afterwards, nothing has been done to get the legit citizens back on the rolls.