Fight in a battleground lands in Newark court
Friday, October 29, 2004
BY JOHN P. MARTIN
Star-Ledger Staff

The legal warfare between the national political parties over next week's presidential voting in swing states spread yesterday to a federal courtroom in Newark.

Democratic lawyers dusted off a 23-year-old voter rights case and asked the original judge to apply it in Ohio to block Republicans there from challenging thousands of newly registered voters.

After a three-hour emergency hearing in Newark, U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise agreed to resume arguments on Monday in a case filed by a Cleveland woman who claims she is one of 35,000 Ohio voters whose registrations could be challenged at the polls on Tuesday. 
 
 Democrats contend the list is disproportionately packed with minorities and urban residents and that GOP poll watchers will use it to stifle the vote in traditional Democratic strongholds.

"If challenges are made on Election Day for everybody on these lists, then those polling places will grind to a halt," John Nields, an attorney for 20-year-old Ebony Malone told the judge.

An attorney representing the Republican National Committee countered that the list represents genuinely questionable registrations and was compiled by state election officials, not the party. Attorney Bobby Burchfield also said the Democrats' legal charges are frivolous, designed to distract GOP leaders and allow fraud at the polls.

"This is calculated to disrupt the operations of the Republican National Committee before Election Day," he said.

The dispute over the Ohio voting rolls has emerged as one of the most heated of a slew of legal battles during the final days of the presidential race.

The appeal filed in New Jersey opened a second front in the Democrats' effort to block the use of the list. A judge in Ohio on Wednesday halted the GOP challenges, but the Ohio Republican Party and the state attorney general have both appealed to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Democrats in New Jersey argued that the challenges violate court-ordered decrees signed in the 1980s after complaints that Republican efforts to monitor fraud at the polls were actually voter intimidation campaigns against minorities.

In 1981, Republicans launched a Ballot Security Task Force that mailed letters to registered New Jersey voters in largely African-American districts, then challenged the registrations of those people whose letters were returned as undeliverable because they had moved.

The party later agreed not to use ethnic or racial criteria in such voter integrity initiatives. But after a second violation in 1987, Debevoise ordered the RNC to get his approval before launching any such "ballot security" measures in any state.

The case lay dormant since 1990, until Nields filed his motion this week asking the judge to reopen it. Joining him were Edward Hailes, an attorney for Advancement Project, a social action group that spearheaded registrations in Ohio, as well as Democratic Party attorney Angelo Genova and Nutley labor lawyer Craig Livingston.

Nields asked the judge for permission to depose top Republican officials and review party documents to discern its role in the Ohio challenges.

"We want to understand the role that the RNC played here," he said.

Burchfield, who was joined by GOP attorneys Dorothy Harbeck and William Palatucci, argued that Nields didn't have standing because his client Malone wasn't a party in the initial New Jersey case. He also said the Ohio list reflected voters statewide, not just minorities, and that the national party had no role in compiling it.

"This is not a situation where either the state or the national party has singled out minority (voting) districts," he said.

Burchfield said that names such as Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy have cropped up in new registration lists. "What they're desiring to do is to have no review of these questionable registrations," he said.

Debevoise concluded that Malone had legal standing to join in the matter. Since Debevoise presided over the initial case nearly a quarter-century ago, lawyers for the political parties have reopened the case to settle similar disputes in Louisiana, North Carolina and California.

But the judge left unresolved what he might do. He ordered both sides to produce evidence and testimony regarding the statistical makeup of the list, the GOP role in compiling it and how the state of Ohio planned to conduct its polling places and deal with registration challenges. The judge said he wanted to know if such challenges would really be disruptive at the polls.

Both sides agreed to hand-deliver papers to the judge's home by noon Sunday, then return to court the next morning to resume arguments.

"The latest I can act is Monday to have any practical effect," Debevoise said.