That shortcoming allowed Patterson, for example, to register two years after his latest conviction. And Borges' grandma says that a couple of years after his legal problems, she innocently persuaded him to vote and get involved in the political process. "It's my fault, " she says. "If I'd known it was a bad thing to do, I wouldn't have done it."

On the voter registration form is a check-off box stating the applicant is not a felon. One felon says he filled it in.

"I don't remember if I even read it, " says another, Julio Morina, 43. He registered in August 1996. "Is that a crime?"

NOBODY ASKED HIM

Michael Cooke, a onetime crack addict now working as a janitor and going to school, credits divine intervention. After a horrific three-month stint in the county jail, Cooke vowed last year to become a productive member of society.

Living in a homeless shelter, he registered to vote in March 1997, then later changed his address to the apartment next door to the one police accused him of burglarizing. He says he left the convicted-felon box blank -- and no one asked him if he was a felon.

A drug rehabilitation counselor asked Cooke, once known as Cool Breed, how he managed to register. "You haven't even been reinstated as a citizen yet, " Cooke quoted him as saying.

"I guess I just did it, " the 46-year-old Cooke replied. "I must be blessed."

More than half of the illegal felon voters registered after their convictions, records show. Dozens of others were able to vote because of criminal-justice snafus.

This is how the system is supposed to work: Every month, Metro-Dade Circuit Court sends a list of convicts to county election clerks, who strip the names from the voter rolls. But the lists are incomplete, to say the least.

CROSSING THE BORDER

For one thing, they don't contain the names of convicts from circuit courts outside Dade -- not even from Broward County. In last November's mayoral race, that glitch allowed at least 10 people convicted in Broward to vote in Dade.

"If someone is on the books to vote, then why not vote?" asks Barbara White, mother of 27-year-old Felix White. A onetime cashier with a bobcat tattoo on his left arm, Felix White was convicted of robbing a couple in a restaurant parking lot in Sunrise. "I don't understand the system, " his mom says. "The election people are going about this the wrong way."

Like the out-of-county felons, those from out ofstate fall through a "huge black hole, " clerk Ruvin says. That's what happened with Kappuzine Avant, 29, a former fugitive. She was convicted in South Carolina of a 1990 cocaine-trafficking conspiracy. Her name never turned up for removal from the registration rolls. Then there's a whole separate set of undetected felons: people convicted in federal courts.

It wasn't until January 1995 that the U.S. attorney's office in Miami began notifying election clerks of federal convicts.

Though he hasn't voted, Abel Holtz, the millionaire convicted banker who had a tennis complex named after him in Miami Beach, is still on the Dade rolls. And Pablo Camacho, the Miami undercover detective convicted in the coverup of a drug dealer's death, cast a ballot in the November mayoral election. For whom, he won't say.

"My case is still under appeal, " Camacho says. "Until it's final, I guess I retain everything."

APPEALS DON'T MATTER

Prosecutors say Camacho is mistaken, noting that if felons could vote while waiting for appeals, the right would go to Death Row inmates. Although a 1977 ruling backs him up, the latest Florida opinion, written in 1995, disqualifies a felon from voting -- upon conviction, not after appeals.