Shortly after the purge list was issued, CNN sued Hood for access, and on July 1, a Florida state court judge ordered Hood to release the list. The very next day, the Miami Herald reported that after inspecting the purge list it had quickly determined that it included the names of 2,100 people whose voting rights had been previously been restored through formal clemency. Then, on Sept. 7, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that of the 47,763 names on the list, only 61 were classified as Hispanics. The next day, the New York Times amplified these concerns, explaining in detail that the errors in the list were systematic -- that is, there were specific problems in the list-matching process that excluded people who'd identified themselves as Hispanic. According to Jim McAvoy, a spokesman for Accenture, the contracting firm that helped the state with the software to create the purge lists, the problem arose because the FDLE's felon database and the state's registration database classified Hispanics differently. The felon database identified Hispanics as being of the race "white" whose ethnicity was "Hispanic," while the state's voter-registration database identified them as Hispanic and had no field for ethnicity. Because the software looked for strict matches between the race field in the two databases, many Hispanic names in the felon database never matched with records in the registration database, and Hispanics were therefore far less likely to be included on the purge list. In Florida, Cubans make up the largest bloc of Hispanics, and Cubans tend to vote Republican.

The New York Times story was published on a Saturday; that afternoon, Hood's office arranged an emergency press conference and announced that it was scrapping the purge list due to what Hood called "unintentional and unforeseen" errors. But were the errors having to do with Hispanic voter classification really unintentional and unforeseen? McAvoy, of Accenture, says that his company was not at fault. He explains that Accenture had no way of knowing that the two lists -- the felon list from the FDLE and the voter-registration list from the Division of Elections -- each identified Hispanics in fundamentally incompatible ways. That's because the state, he says, did not provide his company with the entire FDLE felon list; Accenture was never shown that the felon list included an extra ethnicity category for identifying Hispanics, he said.

There's reason to believe, though, that Hood's office should have known of such a problem. In the late 1990s, Database Technologies (DBT), the Florida company that was then charged with drawing up the felon purge list, notified the state of the dangers of matching by race, according to Chuck Jones, a spokesman for Choicepoint, which now owns DBT. "DBT informed the state that many of the lists that were being used to develop a list of potential voters to purge did not include Hispanic as a separate category," Jones says. "And on other lists, Hispanic individuals, being left with no appropriate selection, were categorizing themselves as white. So DBT advised the state, 'Don't use race as an identifying category.'" This warning was given before Hood took office, but Jones says that some of the personnel in the office then still work there now. Salon sent Hood a set of detailed questions regarding the processes used to draw up the felon list, but we were ignored.

Was Hood's felon list borne of a mere glitch, or was it a partisan effort to disenfranchise a large Democratic voting bloc? Civil rights advocates in Florida are usually willing to give state officials the benefit of the doubt in such matters; Florida certainly has its share of inept elections officers, and whenever there's some kind of problem it's always quite possible that the disaster occurred because someone just -- innocently -- screwed up royally. But not in this case, many say. "As soon as the newspapers got the list, they found all these names" of people who shouldn't have been on there, Martha Mahoney points out. State officials should just as easily have been able to spot those errors.

"I think there are a lot of election problems in Florida that are the result of incompetence," Howard Simon, of the ACLU, says. "I'm not sure this story fits into that category. As much as I avoid being seduced by conspiratorial theories, it's hard not to think that this area -- the area in which people would be purged, in which a disproportionate number of African-Americans would be purged --- it's hard not to arrive at the conclusion that the cavalier attitude of elections officials in using a list two election cycles in a row which they were warned was defective was not in part dictated by impermissible partisan interests."

Asked about the possibility that Hood had drawn up the felon list in such a way as to exclude Democrats on purpose, a spokesman for Jeb Bush reacted sarcastically. "Are you saying that felons are Democrats?" he asked. Then, when it was pointed out that the state had excluded many of the possible Republican felons, he explained away the problem as simply a glitch.

Blacks in the state don't see it that way, however. Sam Heyward, the Tallahassee voter whose name was included in the purge list, says that he believes there "must have been some other motive," whether racist or merely partisan, to explain the state's behavior. William McCormick, the president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the NAACP, says the list "violated the ethics of democracy -- it was incomplete, imprecise and incorrect. How could you produce something that sensitive with such a profound impact and not make sure it had been validated? They were trying for disenfranchisement, and someone did it on purpose." Yet at the same time, many blacks in the state said they're not intimidated by the state's efforts -- they're emboldened. After what happened in 2000, "now we're coming for revenge," McCormick says. "They're going to see the greatest turnout they've ever seen. And I guarantee that every ballot cast in Broward County is going to be counted -- over my dead body they won't. I'm not going to be intimidated, swayed, threatened away from voting. I guarantee you they're going to be fired."

McCormick's prediction may indeed be right. Florida's voter registration deadline was Monday, Oct. 4, and in the weeks leading up to that day, jurisdictions across the state reported surges in registrations over previous years. At least a few locations have indicated huge upswings in the number of Democratic voters in particular. In Miami-Dade, for instance, there were 150,000 new registrants this year, according to Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the county's election department. In 2000, for comparison, there were only 58,000 new registrants, and they were split between Democrats and Republicans roughly equally. But this year, Democrats account for twice as many new voters as Republicans; as of September, about 40 percent of the new registrants in Miami-Dade identified themselves as Democrats, while only 20 percent called themselves Republicans.

It's unclear if this trend is reflected in other parts of the state; metropolitan South Florida is known to be a Democratic stronghold, after all. But if it is true, perhaps the trend illustrates just what McCormick says -- the previously disenfranchised thousands in Florida are coming for revenge. That would be, says Rep. Wexler, the most fitting end for the partisan officials who rule democracy here. "Vote the rascals out," he says. "Go and vote George W. Bush out of office. That is the best response to the dilatory and unfair ... strategies and practices of Jeb Bush."

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