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U.S. backs off election lawsuits
By ADAM C. SMITH and WES ALLISON A week after reigniting the controversy over the 2000 presidential election, the Justice Department told Congress on Tuesday that no Floridians were intentionally prevented from voting and that problems at the polls caused only a few people to leave without voting. The letter followed the department's surprise announcement last week that it would sue three Florida counties -- Orange, Osceola and Miami-Dade -- for failing to provide adequate help at the polls. "While the Civil Rights Division discovered evidence of significant confusion and delay in the three counties, there were relatively few voters who actually did not vote because of these problems," wrote Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd, Justice's chief enforcer of civil rights laws. After looking into 11,000 complaints about the presidential election, the Justice Department found violations in the three counties -- mostly because of language barriers -- and this "may have resulted in at least 26 voters choosing to leave the polls," he wrote. That number of voters, Boyd added, "doesn't reasonably cast any doubt on President Bush's several hundred vote margin of victory in Florida." The department's announcement was immediately greeted with partisan skepticism. The letter, addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, arrived Tuesday evening while Congress was on holiday recess and most members were in their home states. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., was not happy about being surprised with the news Tuesday night. He demanded to see the proof that led to the department's announcement. "That is a stretch for me to believe, out of 11,000 complaints with everything that we went through," Nelson said from an Ocala hotel. "But I want to see the document. And if they don't give it to us as they promised to do, then Sen. (Bob) Graham and I will haul them before the respective committees and force them to testify. "We want to see that the civil rights of the people of Florida were not violated in the 2000 election." State Rep. Chris Smith, D-Fort Lauderdale, questioned why the agency even mentioned George W. Bush's narrow victory in a letter about civil rights violations. "The Justice Department is not supposed to be dealing with that. Just mentioning it shows they're politicizing people's rights," said Smith, suggesting that the department backed off its intervention after news of pending civil rights lawsuits took so many politicians by surprise last week. Last week, Boyd told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the civil rights division was preparing to sue the three counties for election law violations relating to the 2000 presidential election, with an eye toward reaching quick settlements. The news stunned state and national politicians, and briefly raised the hopes of civil rights activists who had long complained about voters being disenfranchised in 2000. But as details emerged that the violations dealt mostly with "language assistance," Democrats and civil rights lawyers complained the Justice Department glossed over myriad problems alleged by African-American voters. For example, many blacks were barred from the polls because the state wrongly included them on a list of felons. Ron Labasky, an attorney for Florida's association of election supervisors, said the department's new letter appeared to counterbalance Boyd's statements about the lawsuits last week. "It got out in front of them," he said. "They may be just making sure that there was no impression there was any serious wrongdoing." State House Minority Leader Lois Frankel said the real surprise was that the Justice Department would intervene at all. "To try to mitigate it is not surprising," she said. "I think it's questionable how hard the Justice Department actually looked at what happened in Florida." In Tuesday's letter, Boyd said one unidentified county may have hired too few bilingual workers, causing delays in providing assistance. "This may have resulted in at least 26 voters choosing to leave the polls," he wrote. In one county, Boyd said, his investigators confirmed that a clerk denied poll watchers permission to help four voters who asked for bilingual assistance. The denial constitutes a violation of the Voting Rights Act. In another unidentified county, investigators found two cases of Haitian-American voters being denied language assistance, Boyd said. However, the investigation could not confirm 15 other allegations of voters being denied bilingual assistance. In the third county, political party poll watchers alleged that about 140 voters had difficulty casting ballots, "but it appears that in every instance the voter was referred to the Supervisor of Elections Office" for assistance, Boyd wrote. "The Civil Rights Division has no evidence that any of these individuals was unable to cast a ballot." Also in the third county, the Civil Rights Division's investigation "indicated that a lack of bilingual poll workers resulted in considerable confusion at the polls, and that some poll workers were hostile to Hispanic voters." The three counties are working to fix the problems the department identified. David Leahy, Miami-Dade's election supervisor, said he was not surprised that the department failed to find evidence of wrongdoing. "We all have the same goal," he said. "We don't need to be hit over the head with a lawsuit." Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida NAACP, which has sued several counties over the 2000 elections, said that despite the federal government's limited intervention, thousands of Floridians and Americans know first-hand what happened to them in November 2000. "Basically, the message of the Justice Department says, 'Your vote doesn't count.' " The controversy won't be ending any time soon. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which Republicans call a blatantly pro-Democrat group, plans to return to Florida on June 20 to review election reform in Florida. Last year, the commission issued a report stating that it found "strong and credible evidence of violations of the Voting Rights Act." The Miami session is supposed to assess election reform in Florida, and will also take up the Justice Department's response. Last week, commission chairwoman Mary Frances Berry noted that the commission found "widespread" problems that went "far beyond" the three counties targeted by the Justice Department. -- Information from the Associated Press was included in this report.
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