© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2002
If the U.S. Department of Justice hoped that voting rights lawsuits against three Florida counties would be the final chapter in the tortured saga of the 2000 election, it failed miserably.
Instead, George W. Bush's administration might have added another complication to brother Jeb's re-election campaign.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, civil rights lawyer Ralph Boyd dropped word that lawsuits would soon be filed to force settlements in counties where treatment of minority voters violated the Voting Rights Act.
The feds wouldn't name the counties. All three, accustomed to living in open-government sunshine, quickly coughed up the letters Washington didn't want you to know about.
The letters show that after an 18-month investigation, nearly 11,000 complaints, discussions with Attorney General Bob Butterworth's office and even a review of the NAACP's complaint logs, the federal government has determined that only certain minority voters were wronged.
They were Hispanics in Orange and Osceola counties and Haitians in Miami-Dade.
Not a single word from Justice about Katherine Harris' flawed purged voter list. Nothing, either, about the high number of discarded "overvotes" in areas with high concentrations of black voters, such as Jacksonville.
"Too little, too late," said Anita Hodgkiss, a civil rights lawyer who sued seven counties on behalf of the NAACP.
Duval County Supervisor of Elections John Stafford didn't get a nasty letter from Washington. But Donna Bryant did.
Bryant is the supervisor of elections in Osceola County, where nearly one of every three voters is Hispanic. There, the government found too few bilingual poll workers, a dearth of information in Spanish and an atmosphere in which some Hispanics felt intimidated as recently as August, when the county held a special election to fill a vacant state Senate seat.
"Hispanic voters in Osceola County had less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process," Boyd wrote to Bryant. Some poll workers were "hostile" to Spanish-speaking voters and "they were insistent that these voters should speak English in order to be able to vote," Boyd added.
Like Bryant, Orange County's Bill Cowles is a Democrat. The third election supervisor, David Leahy of Miami-Dade, is a non-partisan appointee of the county manager. Democrat Al Gore carried all three counties.
Coincidence? Yes, says Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson.
"We've conducted our investigation based on credible evidence," Nelson said. "Our voting rights section considered all voting rights allegations made by all groups."
Democrats don't seem troubled by government findings that Democratic election officials discriminated against Hispanics. Rather, they see a partisan motive in which counties were selected. It's well known that Republicans are reaching out to the growing number of Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida.
"It doesn't pass the smell test," says state Democratic chairman Bob Poe. "What is their political agenda? To make inroads and score points with non-Cuban Hispanics and Haitians. That's why this is just so suspicious."
Poe said he would contact members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, and urge them to probe deeper into the Justice Department's legal strategy in Florida.
That's not all. On Friday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced it would come back to Florida June 20 for a daylong hearing in Miami, including a discussion of the Department of Justice's findings.
You remember the Commission on Civil Rights. That's the group that said it found widespread evidence of minority voter "disenfranchisement" in the 2000 vote. Republicans dismissed the panel as a band of bitter Clinton-Gore partisans more interested in partisan revenge than the truth of Nov. 7, 2000.
-- Steve Bousquet is deputy chief of the Times' Capital Bureau.