A botched purge designed to stop convicted criminals from voting in Florida may have affected the outcome of the US presidential election. A review by the Los Angeles Times of thousands of pages of records, reports and e-mail messages suggests that many people entitled to vote were placed on a list of criminals.
Those on the list were disproportionately black. Blacks made up 66 per cent of those named as criminals in Miami-Dade, the state's largest county, for example, and 54 per cent in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa.
Blacks voted more than nine to one for Mr Al Gore across the state. Mr George W. Bush ultimately won Florida by only 537 votes out of nearly six million cast.
No evidence has emerged to indicate that anyone illegally conspired to keep blacks from voting in November.
The criminal lists were compiled by Database Technologies Inc (DBT), now part of ChoicePoint Inc, an Atlanta company. In 1998 DBT won a $4 million (£3.6 million) contract from the Florida secretary of state's office to cross-check with law enforcement and other records the 8.6 million names registered to vote in the state.
Over the next two years DBT built a database that was used to identify - and all too often wrongly identify - about 100,000 criminals and dead people still registered to vote.
No one knows how many legitimate voters were on that database or were stopped from voting. Some county elections officials were so outraged at the errors that they simply tossed out the lists. Some tried to correct them. And some knew they were faulty but used them anyway.
"We removed a lot of people from the rolls when I knew this was not a truly accurate list," said Mr David Leahy, the Miami-Dade election supervisor. "I don't doubt at all that there were many names of individuals removed statewide that were incorrect," said Ms Pam Iorio, the Hillsborough election supervisor. "Some of those people may not even know to this day that they have been taken off the rolls."
Florida is one of 12 states that bar criminals from voting unless they apply for and win clemency from a state board. Records show more than 2,000 alleged criminals from other states were put on Florida's criminal lists last year, even though those states had restored their voting rights.