Florida sued over rejected voters

A lawsuit claimed election supervisors in five Florida counties discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and others by rejecting thousands of voter applications for failure to check off certain boxes.

BY GARY FINEOUT AND JAY WEAVER   Miami Herald   14 October 2004

Major labor unions are suing Florida's secretary of state and five county election supervisors to force them to accept more than 10,000 voter registration applications that were rejected before the presidential election.

They claim supervisors in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange and Duval counties discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and others because they rejected their applications for failure to check off certain boxes, such as U.S. citizenship.

The suit, citing violations of federal election laws and the Constitution, was filed Tuesday by the AFL-CIO, three other unions and three minorities whose applications were rejected. A hearing is set for 10 a.m. Friday before Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King in Miami federal court.

''[T]hese officials have adopted unduly restrictive registration practices and procedures that violate federal election laws,'' according to the suit.

It also contends that Secretary of State Glenda Hood ``has failed to address and in some instances has affirmatively directed and encouraged these violations.''

Hood's spokeswoman, Alia Saraj, said that the office has been following state and federal law by requiring people to completely fill out voter registration applications, including all of the boxes.

MIAMI-DADE

Miami-Dade's First Assistant County Attorney Murray Greenberg said his office received the complaint late Wednesday, was reviewing it and preparing a response for Friday's hearing.

State officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The complaint follows other legal disputes over the use of provisional ballots at polling stations and demands for paper ballots in South Florida and other counties that only use electronic voting machines.

The crux of the latest suit: The labor groups say they mobilized tens of thousands of voters to register by the Oct. 4 deadline for November's general election. They argue that county election supervisors rejected thousands of registration forms because applicants failed to check off boxes regarding citizenship, felon status or mental capacity, or fill out the last four digits of a Social Security number.

UNCHECKED BOXES

In Miami-Dade County, 3,052 voter registration applications were deemed incomplete because applicants did not check the felon status box, and 3,552 more applications were declared incomplete because the applicants did not check the mental capacity box, according to the suit.

In addition, about 1,200 applications were rejected as incomplete because the applicants had not checked off the citizenship box alone or that box and one of the other two boxes.

Greenberg said his office advised Miami-Dade Election Supervisor Constance Kaplan to accept those applications without the citizenship box checked off as long as the rest of the registration forms were in order and properly signed.

The labor groups want King, a longtime federal judge, to order the five county supervisors to accept the incomplete voter registration applications by declaring the box omissions as ''not material'' errors. In other words, they do not constitute a violation of federal voter registration laws.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Florida Supreme Court was thrust into the battle over the presidential election to decide once again how to count the votes.

This time it's happening 20 days before the election and it has to do with a key provision of the election reform package that the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush pushed into law in 2001.

The AFL-CIO and other unions want the court to force election officials to count so-called provisional ballots regardless of where the voter lives. Those defending the current state law which limits when these ballots are counted include Hood, the statewide association that represents election officials and a relative of the Republican Party chairman of Leon County.

The seven justices heard arguments about the case on Wednesday, but did not give any firm clues as to how or when they would rule, although several justices expressed concerns about overhauling the state's election system with less than three weeks before Election Day.

''Wouldn't it create potential chaos, and actually negatively impact the right of all to vote, if there was simply an unregulated free right to show up at any polling place and vote?'' asked Justice Harry Lee Anstead.

Harkening back to the 2000 presidential election, Chief Justice Barbara Pariente predicted that any state decision could run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court rulings that halted the recount in Florida and resulted in President Bush winning the state by 537 votes.

Yet those pushing the lawsuits, using the same slogans that Democrats did four years ago, argued that it was important to protect the rights of the voters. They said that many people who registered just before the October deadline may not get information on where to vote before Election Day.

''The motivation for us being here today is to ensure that on Nov. 2 every vote is counted and is counted accurately,'' said Alma Gonzalez, special counsel for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

BALLOT RULE

Provisional ballots were created in the 2001 election reform law as a way to guarantee that voters whose names don't show up on the voting rolls, perhaps through error, could still vote on Election Day. If a check shows the voter is indeed eligible to vote, the provisional ballot, which is on paper, is counted.

But the caveat added by state legislators is that provisional ballots must be discarded if the voter didn't go to the right precinct. Lawyers for the unions say this violates Florida's Constitution, which requires only that voters cast their ballots in their home county.

Justices appeared skeptical of this argument, noting that precincts have been required for more than 100 years and that the precinct requirement for provisional ballots may fall within other restrictions on the time and place of voting, like the hours that polling places are open.