4 yrs. later, Florida set for a new fiasco

New York Daily News   14 October 2004

Persistent voter problems in the state of Florida are threatening to plunge another national election into a crisis.

It was bad enough four years ago, when the presidency was decided by a mere 537 votes and Florida turned our election into an international laughingstock.

Who can forget Palm Beach County's infamous butterfly ballot? Or those recounts of hanging chads?

Or worst of all, the merciless purging of thousands of black voters from the rolls through the use of grossly inaccurate felon lists?

This was all supposed to be fixed by now.

Congress passed a federal law to reform voting systems in all 50 states. Florida even signed a consent decree to settle a suit from the NAACP, and Jeb Bush, the President's brother, promised to improve his state's election procedures.

But three weeks before another tight election, major questions remain.

On Tuesday, a routine test of a small portion of Palm Beach County's new electronic touch screen voting machines - the ones that replaced the old punch card system - had to be canceled when the computer system crashed. They'll try a new test tomorrow.

And this week, a group of labor unions and civic groups filed a federal voting rights lawsuit. It charges Jeb Bush's handpicked secretary of state, Glenda Hood, and other election officials with illegally rejecting new voter registration applications from thousands of black and Hispanic voters.

The lead plaintiff in the new suit is Miami resident Emma Yaiz Diaz. On Sept. 17, the day Diaz and her father, Guillermo Diaz, were sworn in as U.S. citizens in Miami Beach, they immediately filled out voter registration forms.

But when two weeks passed and they hadn't received their voter registration cards, the father telephoned the Miami-Dade Board of Elections.

According to affidavits he and his daughter filed, the father was told his application was approved but his daughter's had been rejected as incomplete.

Emma Diaz, it turns out, had neglected to check a box on the form that asks whether the applicant has been "adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting."

According to the complaint, in Miami-Dade alone, more than 3,500 applications were rejected as incomplete for failing to check the same box, 1,200 were denied because they didn't check another box affirming the applicant was a citizen, and more than 3,000 were disqualified for not checking a box that asked whether the person was an ex-felon.

Another plaintiff, Andre Bembry of Jacksonville, claims he registered to vote on Aug. 31. But it was not until Oct. 5, the day after the deadline for registering, that he received a letter telling him his application had been rejected because he neglected to answer the ex-felon question.

"These questions are artificial barriers to voting that are not material," said Judith Browne, attorney for the Washington-based Advancement Project, which filed the suit.

Emma Diaz, Bembry and the other applicants did sign their names to the affidavit on the form that asserts they are indeed U.S. citizens and "qualified to register as an elector under the Constitution and the laws of the State of Florida."

State law, Browne said, requires election boards to verify through their own records whether a person is a convicted felon or has been judged mentally incompetent.

But Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hood, disputed Browne's claim.

"The department cannot ask local supervisors [of election] to waive mandatory provisions [of Florida law]," Nash said.

This is not the first challenge to Florida's voting policies. In May, Hood ordered local election supervisors to purge 48,000 names from the rolls that she had identified as matching a new state database of ex-felons.

Hood fought at first to keep her list secret, but a state court ordered its release to the press in June. The new list, it turned out, includes mostly black men and only 61 Latinos. Everyone knows that blacks in Florida vote overwhelmingly Democratic while Hispanics are largely Republican. Hood's list also included 2,100 people who had received executive clemency and had their voting rights legally restored.

All this in a state that put Jeb Bush's brother in the White House by 537 votes.