Prompt trial on vote urged

A judge hearing a challenge to rejected voter registration forms says it's essential to act quickly.

BY RON WORD

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  16 October 2004

JACKSONVILLE With the election rapidly approaching, a judge Friday urged a quick trial for a lawsuit against Florida's largest counties over the rejection more than 10,000 voter registration forms that elections officials say were improperly filled out.

Nearly 45 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks who want to vote.

The Miami lawsuit is challenging the process that lets counties disqualify people who provided a signature affirming 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 that a tight time frame before the Nov. 2 election made it essential to move quickly, but he did not immediately set a trial date.

A coalition of unions filed the suit 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 lawsuit, claimed that the voter registration practices had an adverse effect on 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 the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, told King that requiring election workers to respond to the demands of the suit while they prepare for the Nov. 2 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 quarter of them 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.

Applications from Democrats comprised about 46 percent of the incomplete forms; 17 percent were from Republicans and the remaining 36.5 percent identified no party or affiliation.

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.

Registrations were stopped for 188 people who failed to mark the box declaring they were not felons. Another 118 forms were held back because people did not mark a box declaring they were mentally competent. State law requires indications of competency and felon status on the registration forms. The remaining ballots lacked signatures, dates of birth or addresses, the elections office reported.

Calls to Hillsborough and Brevard counties seeking information on rejected ballots were not returned Friday.