Judge Rules Against 10,000 Floridians Barred From Voting
/ A federal district judge here dismissed a
lawsuit Tuesday that was filed on behalf of more than 10,000 new voters
whose registration forms had been rejected as incomplete. The judge,
James Lawrence King, said the labor unions that brought the case had no
standing because they had not proved that any of their members were
affected. Judge King also said several other plaintiffs, people who had
turned in incomplete registration forms, could not blame their local
elections supervisors, who were named as defendants. "No federal or
state statute,'' he wrote, "prescribes a time period within which a
supervisor must notify an applicant that her application is
incomplete.'' Sheila Thomas, a lawyer for the Advancement Project, a
rights group that represented the plaintiffs, said, "We think the
ruling is incorrect as a matter of law, and we are considering
appealing it." The suit, brought against elections supervisors in
Broward, Miami-Dade and several other counties, charged that the
rejected registration forms had come disproportionately from blacks and
Hispanics. In some cases, the applicants did not check a box indicating
that they were American citizens, though they signed an oath on the
form affirming that they were. Some registrants corrected their
incomplete forms before the Oct. 4 registration deadline, the suit
said, but elections officials did not always process them in time, and
did not let other registrants know that their forms were flawed. [more]
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- Site NAACP fought for has highest voter turnout [more]
- Black leaders monitoring vote: Mayor Street (Philadelphia), the Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, and others vowed to fight fraud.
- DOJ `Woefully Unprepared' [more]
