By Larisa Alexandrovna and John Byrne | RAW STORY Staff

A lead director of the company hired by Florida to fix the state’s controversial felon voting rolls is also chairman of a company many regard as a former pillar of South African apartheid, RAW STORY has discovered.

Since joining the board of African mining conglomerate Anglo American plc a year ago, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart has sought to fend off class-action lawsuits from laborers and Africans who allege the company played a major role in propping up South Africa’s former apartheid government.

Moody-Stuart is lead external director of Accenture, the Arthur Anderson spinoff, which Florida hired to repair issues of eligibility the state’s central voting list. The list disenfranchised thousands of voters—many of them African American—in the 2000 presidential election cycle.

Contracted in 2001 for roughly $2.2 million, Accenture was hired to address voting eligibility issues which wrongly listed African-Americans as felons and thereby rendered them ineligible to vote under Florida law.

After three years on the project, the new list was scrapped July 10 of this year when the media and other watch groups discovered the list enfranchised Hispanic felons, without fully resolving eligibility issues of African Americans.

Miami-Dade, for example, received a filtered list from the state of more than 17,000 names, with only 14 of those wrongly identified as felons restored to the voting rolls. Some noted that Florida’s African Americans tend to vote Democratic, while Hispanics—in part due to the state’s Cuban-American population—tend to vote Republican.

Accenture also failed to comply with a 2000 NAACP settlement which required the firm to notify them and the U.S. Justice Department of project changes.

- posted by J Dub @ 7:01 PM