State: Osceola target of planned lawsuit

TALLAHASSEE -- The visitors who arrived in Osceola County last summer were not your typical tourists headed for the Magic Kingdom. They were observers from the U.S. Justice Department, checking to see if Osceola protected the rights of its many Hispanic voters.

The feds did not like what they saw on the day of a special election: few bilingual election clerks, scant information in Spanish and pollworkers downright "hostile" to Hispanics, even insisting that voters must speak English to vote.

Those findings, detailed in a letter sent last week from the Justice Department to Osceola, preview a lawsuit seeking to force the county to ensure that all voters are treated equally in the next election.

"Collectively, these actions deny the county's limited English proficient Hispanic citizens an equal opportunity to participate in the county's electoral process, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," says the letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd.

Notoriety for disputed elections just won't end for some Florida counties. But the allegations apparently have little to do with the most notorious aspects of the 2000 presidential election, in which dimpled chads and butterfly ballots became part of the language of a heated national debate.

A Justice Department official Tuesday told a Senate committee that it intends to sue three unidentified Florida counties for allegedly violating civil rights laws.

Across the state Wednesday, that announcement raised questions among elections officials, civil rights activists and politicians about which counties would be targeted and why, about the timing and seemingly narrow scope of the lawsuits, and about whether they're necessary after Florida led the nation in election reform.

The St. Petersburg Times contacted elections officials or county attorneys in 65 of Florida's 67 counties. Only officials in Osceola and Miami-Dade acknowledged they were targets of the Justice Department. Elsewhere, they were guessing about the likely third county.

Miami-Dade's deputy county attorney, Murray Greenberg, said officials there have been involved in ongoing discussions with Justice lawyers, to guarantee that language assistance is provided to Haitian-American voters.

"We're doing everything we can," Greenberg said. "There's really no need for this lawsuit."

For Osceola, where Hispanics make up 27.1 percent of the voting-age population, it will mean an expensive effort to hire and train poll workers to help Spanish-speaking voters.

"It's too premature to get into specific detail as to what the plan is," said Twis Hoang, a county spokeswoman. "We've been in telephone conversations with them and we do plan to come up with a procedure and a plan."

Osceola's problems occurred when it failed to address a dramatic increase in Hispanic residents during the 1990s, said JoNel Newman, a lawyer for the Florida Justice Institute, which has been involved in litigation over the 2000 election. Most of those were Puerto Ricans, who already had U.S. citizenship and voting rights.

In counties where the population includes at least 5 percent of a given minority, the Justice Department requires local elections officials to accommodate that minority with ballots in their language and pollworkers who can translate, Newman said.

The department has designated nine such Florida counties. Osceola is not one of them because the current designations are based on the 1990 census.

Some civil rights activists, who have waged extensive legal battles since the protracted presidential election ended in December 2000, are dissatisfied with the Justice Department's action.

"It's too little, too late," said Anita Hodgkiss, a Washington lawyer at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has been at the forefront of trying to push changes in election procedures. The group filed lawsuits against seven counties: Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange and Volusia.

"It seems especially troubling that they haven't coordinated with us at all," Hodgkiss said of the Justice Department. "It boggles my mind they haven't even talked to us."

The Broward and Leon lawsuits have been settled, with each county agreeing to a different series of changes, such as requiring them to notify voters whose names are dropped or purged from voter lists, and plans to encourage minority voter registration.

State Democratic Party spokesman Ryan Banfill also questioned why, amid the myriad complaints over the 2000 election, the Justice Department would seize on just three counties and no state agencies. Hundreds of voters in 2000 were unable to vote, he noted, because of a list of felons the state gave to counties that was riddled with errors.

"You had people whose rights were stepped all over with that purge list, and the mess is all over (Secretary of State) Katherine Harris' hands," said Banfill.

But Harris, the state's top elections official, who is now running for Congress, also criticized the Justice Department's move. She said in a statement that she has "led the cause of election reform" ever since the election.

Said Harris: "We hope that before anyone in Washington pontificates further about lawsuits, they will hop on a plane to Florida so that they can educate themselves about our accomplishments in election reform."

Ron Labasky, an attorney for Florida's state association of election supervisors, called the timing "a little suspect," and suggested authorities were trying to make it appear that they were ensuring that all votes would be counted next time.

Labasky noted that the election was over 18 months ago and that the supervisors are now scrambling to prepare poll workers and voters for the first election featuring new touch-screen machines and a provisional ballot.

The Justice Department also is reviewing a bill the Legislature passed recently that expands the access of disabled voters to the polls. The bill was the product of a task force Harris appointed in August and specifies how precincts should help disabled voters with the equipment and still maintain the confidentiality of a vote.

Dunedin lawyer Richard La Belle, a task force member and secretary of the Florida Coalition for Disability Rights, spent part of Wednesday on the phone with a lawyer from the Justice Department's civil rights division.

"Mostly what we talked about was access for people with disabilities," said La Belle, who helped write the bill. "Some of it was about (task force) testimony. Some of it was access to voting machines . . . and poll worker sensitivity," La Belle said.

Much of the bill doesn't go into effect until 2004, and it relies on federal money to pay for such things as wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking spaces. Gov. Jeb Bush has not acted on the bill.

-- Times staff writers Alisa Ulferts, Adam C. Smith and Thomas C. Tobin contributed to this report.

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