Florida Central Voter File

The Florida Central Voter File was an internal list of legally eligible voters used by the US Florida Department of State Division of Elections to monitor the official voter lists maintained by the 67 county governments in the State of Florida between 1998 and January 1, 2006. The exclusion of eligible voters from the file was a central part of the controversy surrounding the US presidential elections in 2000, which hinged on results in Florida. The 'Florida Central Voter File' was replaced by the Florida Voter Registration System on January 1, 2006 when a new federal law, the Help America Vote Act, came into effect.

At the time, Florida was the only state that paid a private company to purge the voter file of ineligible voters, in effect allowing a private company to make the administrative decision of who is not eligible to vote. The State of Florida's Division of Elections was required to contract with a private entity to purge its voter file by chapter 98.0975 of the Florida statutes, which had been enacted by the Florida legislature to address voter registration fraud found during the 1997 Miami mayoral election.

Previously, voter purging had been conducted (sometimes controversially) by local elections officials. During the Civil Rights Movement, local elections officials in southern states, including Florida, were the subjects of lawsuits, marches and civil disobedience as African-Americans attempted to register to vote. This led to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, banning discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans off the voter rolls.

The first firm hired on 1998 to purge the voter rolls was Professional Service Inc., which charged $5,700 for the job. Later in the same year, the state placed an open request for tenders to bid for the job. The contract was assigned to DBT Online, despite the fact that its bid was the highest-priced. The state gave the job to DBT for a first-year fee of US $2,317,800 with total fees eventually reaching US $4 million The Florida Department of Elections terminated Professional Service Inc.'s contract in 1999. DBT Online was acquired by ChoicePoint in early 2000.

At first, Florida specified only exact matches on names, birthdates and genders to identify voters as felons. However, state records reveal a memo dated March 1999 from Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for the state elections office who was supervising the felon purge, asking DBT to loosen its criteria for acceptable matches. When DBT representatives warned Mitchell that this would yield a large proportion of false positives (mismatches), Mitchell's reply was that it would be up to each county elections supervisor to deal with the problem.

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