Text 4119, 134 rader
Skriven 2004-10-27 04:50:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Lawsuits
================
This is excellent.  I hope the rest of the nation takes notice and 
punishes the democrats for dragging this election into court.

============================================

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041027-123332-5663r.htm

Democrats file 9 suits in Florida


By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Democrats in Florida already are pursuing nine election-related 
lawsuits, accusing state election officials of conspiring to 
disenfranchise minority voters. 
    Led by the Florida Democratic Party, the People for the American 
Way, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 
and the AFL-CIO, the lawsuits target, among others, Florida Secretary of 
State Glenda Hood, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, 
President Bush's brother. 
    The suits say Republican officials refused to count provisional 
ballots, improperly disqualified incomplete voter registrations, 
established overly restrictive rules to disproportionately hurt minority 
voters and actively sought to disenfranchise blacks. 

 Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said Republicans are 
"trying to scare people away from the polls." 
    But Mrs. Hood's spokesman, Alia Faraj, described the lawsuits as 
politically motivated, saying they were eroding public confidence in the 
election process by challenging "every single law we are following." 
    One suit challenges a ruling by Mrs. Hood to throw out forms on 
which new voters had failed to check a box indicating whether they were 
U.S. citizens, and another argued that although only 17 percent of the 
voters in Broward County and 20 percent in Miami-Dade County were black, 
more than a third of the voter-registration forms that were determined 
to be incomplete and invalid in both counties involved black voters. 
    The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has successfully 
challenged a ruling on how counties with touch-screen voting should 
conduct manual recounts. The state had banned the recounts, but an 
administrative-law judge agreed with the ACLU challenge and tossed that 
rule in August. 
    Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, yesterday predicted that 
Mr. Kerry would employ "fraud, intimidation and lawsuits" in an attempt 
to overturn a Bush victory on Tuesday. He said if Democrats lose at the 
ballot box, they would use lawyers "to try to shoehorn a victory." 
    "What you're seeing is an attempt, through lawsuits and through 
intimidation, by Democrats to convert their allies' registration fraud 
into voter fraud on Election Day," he said. "What you're going to see is 
an attempt by them, regardless of what the outcome is, to say: 'It's 
unfair. We're going to sue.' " 
    Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ed Gillespie said the 
lawsuits are part of a Democratic plan to "use lawyers and baseless 
allegations to skew the results in their favor." He said the RNC thinks 
that "no legitimate voter should be disenfranchised, either by being 
denied a vote or by having an honest vote canceled out by a fraudulent 
vote." 
    Mr. Gillespie said teams of Democratic lawyers will seek to change 
the rules in ways that would make it easier to engage in systematic 
voter fraud on Election Day. 
    "The American people should be confident that legitimate voters 
casting legitimate votes determine the outcome of this election," he 
said. 
    Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry McAuliffe has 
accused Republicans of engaging in "systematic efforts" to 
disenfranchise voters, imposing unlawful identification requirements on 
voters, throwing eligible voters off the rolls and depriving voters of 
their right to cast a provisional ballot. 
    "Regardless of party or candidate, it is the civic and moral duty of 
both parties to encourage complete and full participation in the 
democratic process," he said in a recent letter to Mr. Gillespie. 
    In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a Florida recount be 
halted after 36 days, giving the state's 25 Electoral College votes to 
Mr. Bush, which put him in the White House. The high court, according to 
public statements by several justices, did not think the ruling would 
prompt a flood of lawsuits in future federal, state and local elections. 
But both major parties since have hired an army of lawyers to respond to 
potential legal challenges this year. 
    The DNC has 10,000 lawyers on call, including six "SWAT squads" that 
are ready to deploy on the orders of Mr. Kerry and his campaign staff. 
The team is headed by Steven Zack, whose law partner, David Boies, 
argued for former Vice President Al Gore before the Supreme Court in 
2000. 
    The RNC is coordinating a countervailing force of lawyers to respond 
to voter challenges in 30,000 key precincts, mostly battleground states. 
The effort is being directed through Republican state party officials. 
Former Bush administration Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who 
argued for Mr. Bush in the Supreme Court case, is expected to be a key 
player in any Republican legal challenges. 
    "We will have the folks on the ground, we will have the strategy to 
deal with that and we will protect the integrity of the election 
process," Mr. Mehlman said. 
    In 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said after a three-
month investigation that the Florida presidential election was rife with 
"injustice" and "ineptitude" that resulted in the disenfranchisement of 
black voters. 
    But two members of the eight-member panel, Abigail Thernstrom, a 
Republican, and Russell G. Redenbaugh, an independent, disputed the 
findings in a 50-page dissent, saying commission investigators used 
flawed data to justify a "preconceived, partisan belief" the election 
was marred by discrimination and disfranchisement of minority voters. 
    Mrs. Thernstrom said at the time that a more rigorous statistical 
analysis showed that race was unrelated to the rate of ballot spoilage 
and that no evidence supported accusations of disfranchisement or 
discrimination of minorities. She said the Florida election was 
"hampered only by problems that were neither motivated by racial 
discrimination nor served to disfranchise minority voters." 
    During hearings in Tallahassee, Fla., the commission called three 
black voters to substantiate what the panel said was a "conspiracy" to 
block minority voters from polling places, but none of three could show 
that they had been denied their right to vote. No other witnesses were 
called. 
    John Nelson, the Rev. Willie D. Whiting and Roberta Tucker, all of 
Tallahassee, testified under oath that they had concerns and had read 
about problems concerning voter irregularities, but all of them voted at 
their polling precincts. 
    Mr. Nelson said he saw unmanned police cars near different polling 
places on Election Day and thought that was "unusual." Mrs. Tucker said 
she was detained at a routine police driver's license checkpoint that 
had been functioning for weeks before the election, but was waved on 
after producing her valid license. Mr. Whiting said his name had been 
purged by mistake from the voting rolls when he had inaccurately been 
identified as a felon, but was allowed to vote after a call to an 
election supervisor. 
    Commission Chairman Mary Frances Berry, an independent who has 
supported Democratic candidates and causes, said at the time that even 
though none of the witnesses had been denied access to a polling site, 
"we know some bad things happened." 
    •Bill Sammon contributed to this article.


--- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10
 * Origin:  (1:226/600)