Florida: Judge Rules Against 10,000 Floridians Barred From Voting

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/campaign/27felon.html?oref=login

 

October 27, 2004

FLORIDA

Judge Rules Against 10,000 Floridians Barred From Voting

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

 

MIAMI, Oct. 26 - 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.

 

The suit is among several charging voter disenfranchisement that are

being fought by the administration of Gov. Jeb Bush.

 

In another case, the federal appeals court in Atlanta heard new

arguments on Tuesday in a class-action suit seeking to end Florida's

policy stripping all felons of the right to vote. That court is not

expected to rule before Election Day.

 

The suit, filed just before the 2000 election by the Brennan Center

for Justice at New York University, charges that the state's ban on

felons' voting is racially discriminatory. It estimates that the law

strips blacks of voting rights at more than twice the rate of whites.

The plaintiffs are the 600,000 people with felony convictions who the

Brennan Center estimates have finished serving their time in Florida

yet still cannot vote.

 

The ban has been in effect since 1868, when Florida gave blacks the

right to vote as a condition of the state's being readmitted to the

Union after the Civil War. A new State Constitution drafted that year

expanded the number of crimes that required disenfranchisement, a

change that the plaintiffs say was intended to affect blacks

disproportionately.

 

They also charge that the discriminatory intent persists, even though

the provision was re-enacted in 1968 as part of a new Constitution.

 

A federal judge in Miami dismissed the suit in 2002. But in December a

three-judge panel of the appeals court reversed the decision and

ordered a trial, saying the state had to prove that it had re-enacted

the provision for a " nondiscriminatory purpose " and not just for the

sake of continuity.

 

Lawyers for Governor Bush, the defendant, asked for a rehearing, which

is what took place before the full appeals court on Tuesday.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company