Will the GOP FINALLY be held accountable for decades of minority vote suppression? Developing...
Voting suit revisits intimidation claims
Letters targeting Ohio minorities said to violate settlement after Kean-Florio race in'81
Monday, November 01, 2004
BY ROBERT SCHWANEBERG
Star-Ledger Staff
Armed guards wearing armbands patrolled polling places. Signs warned of criminal penalties for voting illegally. Hundreds of thousands of letters returned as undeliverable were used to compile a list of voters to be challenged at the polls.
Republicans said they were trying to keep the election honest.
Democrats said Republicans were trying to intimidate black and Latino voters.
It was 1981, during one of the closest elections in New Jersey history -- one that wasn't decided until a recount that dragged on nearly a month found Republican Tom Kean had defeated Democrat Jim Florio for governor by less than 2,000 votes.
State and county prosecutors launched probes into voter intimidation. Furious Democrats filed a $10 million federal lawsuit accusing the Republican state and national committees of depriving minorities of their constitutional right to vote.
But the criminal probes went nowhere and the lawsuit was settled a year later for $1. The Republicans admitted no wrongdoing, but signed a promise never to target minority voters for special treatment -- anywhere in the nation.
That 22-year-old settlement agreement is why a case will be argued today in federal district court in Newark that could affect the outcome of the presidential election. The lawsuit charges Republicans again with targeting minorities, this time in Ohio, a key battleground state in the race between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry.
The lawsuit claims letters were sent to predominately black areas of Ohio and those that were returned as undeliverable were used to compile a list of 35,000 voters to be challenged at the polls. It claims that action violates the 1982 settlement in the New Jersey case, where the same tactic was used.
Craig Livingston of Nutley, one of the lawyers bringing the case, said mass challenges are intended to keep minority voters from the polls.
"Can you imagine 35,000 people being challenged in one big county, say Bergen County, on Election Day?" Livingston said. "People would be voting until 3 o'clock in the morning."
Brian Nelson, executive director of the Republican State Committee in New Jersey, said the lawsuit is "right out of the DNC's playbook, where every year prior to Election Day they say there's intimidation taking place where there is not."
The parties also are arguing the matter in Ohio federal courts. A federal district judge in Cincinnati last week ordered a halt to county hearings on the Republican challenges, and a federal appeals court refused to reverse that order.
The case brought in New Jersey is to be argued before U.S. District Court Judge Dickinson Debevoise, the same judge who approved the settlement of the lawsuit challenging the activities of the Republicans' National Ballot Security Task Force during the 1981 election.
That year, in predominately black and Latino precincts in Newark, East Orange, Camden, Trenton and other urban areas, voters going to the polls encountered official-looking signs warning, "It is a crime to falsify a ballot or violate election laws."
Republican-paid poll workers, some of them off-duty police officers carrying their firearms as required by law, patrolled polling places wearing armbands.
Democrats immediately went to court and got a judge to order the signs and armbands removed.
Richard Richards, chairman of the Republican National Committee, proudly defended the program and credited it with electing Kean.
"Anyone opposed to ballot security obviously must be supportive of election fraud," Richards said. "We would've been cheated out of the race if we hadn't been alert."
But within a week, the Republicans had suspended the head of the New Jersey ballot security operation, John Kelly, saying they questioned whether he had misstated his credentials.
Minority leaders were outraged.
The Trenton NAACP chapter president, Kathleen Graham, said, "I, as a black person, feel I was intimidated by the mere presence of a Gestapo arm band in my polling place."
But finding solid evidence that voters had been kept from the polls proved harder. A state command center staffed with 16 deputy attorneys general shut down after four days because an expected flood of complaints never materialized.
In settling the Democrats' lawsuit in November 1982, Republicans agreed never to target minority voters while insisting that had never been their goal. Richard McGlynn, who handled the case for the state GOP, said the party merely agreed "to a set of principles that we support anyway."
Robert Schwaneberg covers legal issues. He can be reached at rschwaneberg@starledger.com or (609) 989-0324.
