U.S. to Sue Over 2000 Fla. Vote

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department, in a surprise disclosure that trains the spotlight once again on President Bush’s victory in the 2000 election, said Tuesday that it will sue three Florida counties for alleged voting rights violations stemming from the hotly contested race.

The department, which largely stayed out of the controversy surrounding the November 2000 race, has quietly begun settlement negotiations with the three counties, Assistant Atty. Gen. Ralph Boyd told a Senate committee. He refused to name the counties that will be sued, but Miami-Dade is believed to be one of them.

The settlement talks could produce agreements in a matter of weeks that would require the implementation of voting reforms to ensure that federal laws are followed in elections, Justice Department officials said. Traditionally, such consent decrees have often included the imposition of federal monitors at local polling places.

The lawsuits will focus on allegations that minority voters were intimidated at the polls, that people with limited English proficiency were not given bilingual assistance, that “motor voter” registration rolls were improperly purged and that disabled voters were not provided proper access to polling places, among other issues, officials said.

The Justice Department has also decided to bring similar lawsuits against undisclosed cities in Missouri and Tennessee where voting rights allegations surfaced, said Boyd, who heads the department’s civil rights division and personally authorized the upcoming lawsuits.

But the Florida litigation will clearly have the most effect nationwide. The uproar there over butterfly ballots, hanging chads and other voting irregularities suspended the outcome of the election between Bush and Al Gore. The White House hung in the balance for 36 days before a fractured Supreme Court decided to block further recounts and Bush was declared the winner of both Florida and the presidency.

The Justice Department’s decision came as a jolt to state officials in Florida, who said they had no inkling that federal litigation was under consideration.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the president, told reporters he did not know anything about the lawsuits and was unaware of any cases in which voters were denied access to ballots. “I know there were some accusations made and a lot of investigation,” Bush said.

The county attorney in Miami-Dade said it is one of the counties in talks with the Justice Department.

County officials have discussed how they could help Haitian Americans cast their ballots, attorney Robert Ginsburg told Associated Press. “We’ve been talking to the Justice Department along those lines and working with them to see what would make sense”

Many people in Florida do not appear too eager to revisit the controversy. “I thought the issues with the November 2000 election were pretty well settled,” said Kurt Browning, election supervisor in Pasco County near Tampa.

But civil rights groups, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, have pushed to keep the alleged abuses in the public eye, bringing lawsuits on behalf of disenfranchised voters in seven counties: Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange and Volusia. The plaintiffs allege that unfair voting practices in mainly black and Latino areas kept many of the state’s 2 million minority voters from casting ballots.

“It’s a pleasant surprise to us that the Justice Department is finally moving to do something about these gross violations of the Voting Rights Act,” NAACP spokesman Hilary O. Shelton said in an interview. “They can’t do anything to undo the mistakes that were made, but the least they can do is prevent them from ever happening again.”

Shelton said the Justice Department’s lawsuits, coming on the heels of voting reforms enacted by Florida lawmakers to eliminate punch-cards and hand-counted paper ballots--can go a long way toward ensuring that minority voters are not intimidated at the polls, election workers are properly trained and ballot instructions are available in different languages.

Both Republican and Democratic officials in Washington praised the Justice Department’s decision to bring the lawsuits, although former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile called it “a bittersweet victory.”

Some civil rights leaders questioned why the Justice Department waited 17 months to act. But aides to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said the department had moved aggressively.

Beginning under then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, federal voting rights attorneys worked through about 11,000 complaints and zeroed in on 12 primary complaints, and Ashcroft’s administration inherited the case when he took office in February 2001.

“We’ve been saying all along that we had several open investigations but wanted to proceed deliberately to investigate this,” according to a senior official in the Justice Department.

Boyd said some of the counties with which the department has been negotiating have already acknowledged “certain deficiencies” in their voting operations.

Officials said the Justice Department plans to bring suit even in the event of a settlement.

“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.

His disclosure about the Justice Department’s plans came at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to a question from Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), often mentioned as a prospective candidate for the White House in 2004.

Edwards wrote the Justice Department a letter several months ago asking for an update on its investigation into the 2000 voting irregularities, but he received only a “very general, non-specific answer,” said spokesman Michael Briggs.

So Edwards decided to bring it up directly with Boyd at Tuesday’s hearing.

“What we need,” Edwards told Boyd, “is to make sure that we take steps quickly enough to ensure that the problems that occurred in the last election don’t occur in the next election.”

Edwards is still uncertain whether the Justice Department’s litigation will achieve that result, Briggs said. “He wants to see more details before saying that this is a good result.”

In the short term, some political analysts said the rekindled publicity over the 2000 election could hurt Jeb Bush’s reelection bid in November.

“The suspicion in the African American community is that Jeb Bush helped steal the election for his brother, and these kinds of lawsuits will help mobilize that electorate in anger against Jeb in November,” said Dario Moreno, a political science professor at Florida International University in Miami who studied the 2000 vote.

In the two lawsuits planned in Missouri and Tennessee, Justice Department officials refused to name the targeted cities.

But in Missouri, where Ashcroft was voted out of office as senator in the 2000 contest, controversy erupted after that election because of accusations that nearly 1,400 ballots were illegally cast in St. Louis and that Democrats had improperly kept polling places open an extra three hours.

And in Tennessee, at least 2,000 voters who thought they were registered to vote under the state’s motor-voter program discovered that they were not.

The state vowed to revamp the registration program in response to an outpouring of complaints from residents.