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U.S.: 2000 election
harmed minorities
The U.S. Justice Department is preparing to sue three Florida counties for allegedly disenfranchising minorities and other voters during the state's bitterly contested 2000 presidential election.
Lawsuits in Florida and two other states will be based on complaints from more than 11,000 people, an agency official told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
The official, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd, said the suits would be filed in 30 to 60 days, but he declined to say which Florida counties were being targeted. The department also plans to sue some cities in Missouri and Tennessee.
Miami-Dade County is one of the counties in talks with the Justice Department, county attorney Robert Ginsburg said.
County officials have discussed how they could help Haitian Americans cast their ballots, he said. ``We've been talking to the Justice Department along those lines and working with them to see what would make sense.''
He said county officials will meet with Justice lawyers in the next week or two. ''I think it's going to be resolved amicably. I think it may have been already, I'm not entirely sure. But they're going to come down and talk to us about that,'' Ginsburg said.
The Florida suits would cover a variety of allegations, including improper purging of state voter rolls, inadequate access for voters with disabilities, difficulties experienced by minorities and a lack of assistance for some non-English speakers.
Boyd said that the targeted counties are cooperating, and that a settlement could be negotiated with time to spare before the Sept. 10 primaries in Florida. He said the Florida counties have acknowledged ``certain deficiencies we have identified.''
''My hope, my aspiration and my expectation is that in each of those we'll reach an enforceable agreement prior to the filing of the lawsuit,'' Boyd said.
Florida's electoral system came under international scrutiny in the days following the November 2000 election.
As lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore argued the election results in state and federal courts, civil rights activists from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Joseph Lowery, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, joined a growing chorus of complaints that thousands of voters were robbed of their rights to vote.
Some charged that Gore, a Democrat, would have won if not for the violations.
After the election debacle, Florida lawmakers overhauled the state's voting system, eliminating punch-card and hand-counted paper ballots and mechanical lever voting. The state required all counties to have optical-scan ballot systems or touch-screen voting machines in time for the 2002 primary election this September.
Civil rights groups have filed lawsuits over disenfranchised voters against seven Florida counties: Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange and Volusia counties. Broward and Leon counties have settled and a federal judge has asked the civil rights groups to pursue mediation with the remaining counties.
Several groups, as well as dozens of black members of Congress, have alleged that black voters were kept from voting in Florida and other states on Election Day and ballots of others were systematically discarded.
Some Hispanic voters in Florida also alleged that they were required to produce two kinds of identification when only one was required and that they were confused by their ballots.
It was clear late Tuesday that many of the critics were not prepared to trust an investigation by Bush-appointed Attorney General John Ashcroft.
''We just have to wait til we get the facts,'' U.S. Sen. John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat who questioned Boyd during the committee meeting, told The Herald.
``Without knowing exactly what the lawsuits do or what any settlement agreement would contain, it's impossible to know how effective it would be.''
Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, who was Gore's state campaign chairman, noted that Florida legislators and county election supervisors have already worked furiously to resolve the problems, making Ashcroft a late comer. ''It's nice they're coming in and wanting to sue, but I think the Florida supervisors by and large have done a lot to correct the problems we had in 2000,'' he said. ``It's nice when you find out which way the parade is going to go out there and try to lead it.''
Herald staff writer Erika Bolstad contributed to this report, which was supplemented by The Associated Press.
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