Judge takes up rejected voting forms

A U.S. district judge in Miami said he would decide as early as next week whether voters who failed to complete their registration forms will be allowed to go to the polls.

BY JAY WEAVER

jweaver@herald.com

 

The atmosphere in a Miami federal courtroom Friday rekindled memories of the frenzied 2000 presidential election recount battle only this time the fight was over voter registration.

Almost a dozen lawyers argued before Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King about a fast-track plan to address the demands of thousands of rejected voter applications before the Nov. 2 general election.

This week, three minority voter applicants and four labor unions sued Florida's secretary of state and five county election supervisors, including Miami-Dade's, to force them to accept the applications.

They were rejected for failure to check off boxes for U.S. citizenship, felony status and mental capacity as well as providing an identification number.

''We're not going to fiddle around with this case,'' King said Friday. ``We're going to do the best we can with what we have.''

King said he wanted to decide, possibly as early as Friday, whether to order election supervisors in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Orange and Duval counties to accept the rejected voter applicants.

He said that, in the event he orders they be added to the voting rolls, he wants to give the supervisors ample time to do the job.

DEADLINE FOR HOOD

King told lawyers for the election supervisors and Secretary of State Glenda Hood to respond to the lawsuit by Tuesday.

He told attorneys for the minority voter applicants, the AFL-CIO and three other unions to file their reply by 9 a.m. Thursday.

King also told each county to turn over database records of rejected voter registration applicants from April 4 through Oct. 4 the deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 2 general election.

King said he never had experienced such a fast hearing schedule in his more than three decades on the federal bench.

Hood's attorney, Peter Antonacci, told the judge that the lawsuit puts the five election supervisors in a ''very dangerous situation'' because the election is less than three weeks away.

''We're not here to stand in the way,'' Miami-Dade Assistant County Attorney Jeffrey Ehrlich, but he cautioned about the potential for problems in adding thousands of voter applicants at the last minute.

The labor groups, which say they mobilized tens of thousands of people to register to vote in the upcoming general election, contend violations of federal elections laws and the Constitution.

They argue that county election supervisors broke the law by rejecting more than 10,000 voter registration applications because the applicants failed to check off some boxes on the forms.

Hood, who is responsible for maintaining uniformity in elections throughout Florida, asserted that voter applicants must check off the boxes for U.S. citizenship, felony status and mental capacity and fill out a voter identification number such as the last four digits of a Social Security number.

If they're not all checked off, Hood maintained, county election supervisors must reject the applications.

But four of the five counties named as defendants in the lawsuit Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval and Orange recently have agreed to accept hundreds of voter registration forms on which the applicants failed to check off the citizenship box, but signed an oath affirming they are U.S. citizens.

The Miami-Dade County Attorney's Office advised Election Supervisor Constance Kaplan to accept such applications because the oath signature alone is an ''indication'' of U.S. citizenship under state law.

SPOTTY ENFORCEMENT

Initially, Broward Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes decided not to issue voter registration cards for people who did not check off the citizenship box but signed the oath.

But when some of the people who had been turned down began to call her, Snipes said she began to check with other election supervisors to see how they were proceeding in similar cases.

``I found out that Dade, Leon and many other counties were issuing the cards anyway.

'So I said, `Well, why not us, too?' '' Snipes said Friday.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore has rejected voter applications without the citizenship box checked off because she sees the omission as a violation of state law, her office spokesman Marty Rogol said.