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JACKSONVILLE - With the Nov. 2 election looming, a judge Friday said he wants a quick trial of a lawsuit against Florida's largest counties over the rejection more than 10,000 voter registration forms that officials say were improperly filled out.
About 44 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks.
The Miami lawsuit challenges the process that lets counties disqualify people who signed an affirmation of their eligibility to vote but failed to list an identification number, such as from a driver's license, or check boxes affirming they were citizens, were mentally competent and were not felons.
"If the plaintiffs are right, they've got a strong prevailing right. We're talking about voting," U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King said Friday.
He noted the short time before the election made it essential to move quickly, but did not immediately set a trial date.
A coalition of unions filed the lawsuit against Secretary of State Glenda Hood and election supervisors in Duval, Orange, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
The Advancement Project, a Washington-based social action group that helped file the suit, claimed the voter registration practices unequally affected minorities.
For example, of the 1,525 voter registration forms rejected in Duval County, 44 percent came from black voters.
King told the counties to provide information about the rejected forms to the attorneys who filed the case.
Attorney Jeffrey Ehrlich, representing Miami-Dade's elections supervisor, told King requiring election workers to respond to the demands of the suit while they prepare for the election could create problems.
"It is so complicated to run an election and it is very fragile ... you are tinkering with the system," he said.
Miami-Dade County has rejected 4,913 voter registration forms, 35 percent of them from blacks and a 25 percent from Hispanics. Broward County rejected 3,979, officials said Friday.
Orange County set aside 867 incomplete forms. Officials there also decided to issue voter cards to people who failed to check the citizenship box but did sign their name to certify citizenship.
After initially rejecting 46 applications because voters failed to check the citizenship box on the forms, Broward also decided to accept those applications, adopting a process used by neighboring Miami-Dade, an attorney representing Broward elections chief Brenda Snipes said in court Friday.
About 46 percent of the incomplete forms were applications from Democrats, 17 percent were from Republicans and 36.5 percent identified no party.
In Duval County, failing to provide a driver's license number, state identification number or Social Security number was the biggest reason for rejections, causing 578.