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.