Tampa Bay Online

Discrimination Lawsuit Filed Over California Voting Systems

By Michelle DeArmond, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the state Tuesday, saying punch-card ballots like those that led to problems in Florida violate the civil rights of minority voters.

The groups say punch-card voting machines are responsible for undervotes and overvotes, ballots where the machines don't register a selection or pick up more than one choice.

The equipment must be replaced by next spring to prevent the kind of controversy that delayed for weeks a final count in the presidential election, the plaintiffs said.

The ACLU has filed similar lawsuits in Florida, Georgia and Illinois.

Alfie Charles, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said work to reform California's election process has gone on for years.

"We're already moving along these steps. I'm not sure if the lawsuit is useful or necessary," Charles said.

According to the suit, disproportionately high numbers of minorities live in counties with punch-card voting systems and use of the machines violates their civil rights. Those counties accounted for half of the 8.4 million voters registered in California last fall.

The counties named in the suit had average voting error rates of 2.23 percent. By contrast, the rate was 0.6 percent in Riverside County, which uses computer touch-screen technology and posted the lowest error rate in the state.

"Under our Constitution, every vote should be counted, regardless of where a person lives or the color of his or her skin," said Dan Tokaji, an attorney for the ACLU of Southern California. "Unfortunately, that is not true in California today, thanks to outdated equipment which is the voting equivalent of a horse and buggy."

Secretary of State Bill Jones has called for the purchase of touch-screen computers and has proposed statewide guidelines for counting punch-card tabs - or chads - that are not entirely pushed through. In Florida, the standards varied by county.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2001

Answers

So, basically what they're saying is that minorities are too stupid to figure out how to punch a hole in a card. How is it then that over 97% of the people in those same counties were perfectly capable of figuring it out?

Yeah, by all means, let's spend millions of taxpayer dollars to buy touch screen computers so that a vast minority of dumbass minorities can preserve their civil rights.

BTW, aren't whites a minority in Kali? Somehow I think they're not talking about whites, though.

Dan V.

-- Anonymous, April 18, 2001

I don't recall I ever heard the results of California's absentee ballots. Does anyone have any final numbers? There was a question at the time whether they would ever be counted, and there were enough that it could have thrown the national popular vote to Bush.

-- Anonymous, April 19, 2001