Groups press city to settle Voting Rights suit

Jeremy Schwab

Ten activist groups sent a letter to Mayor Thomas Menino and Boston’s city councilors Monday urging the city to settle a lawsuit alleging voting rights violations rather than fight it in court, as Menino has said he will do.

The groups, including the Black Political Task Force, Chinese Progressive Association and the statewide Latino political group ¿Oiste?, note that instances of alleged discrimination against limited English speakers have come to light in the past two election years, 2003 and 2004.

Their letter alludes to some of the main alleged grievances: a lack of bilingual election workers at some polls, voters from certain ethnic groups being told to produce unnecessary documentation and poll workers filling out limited English-speaking voters’ ballots for them or watching as political operatives masquerade as poll workers and tell voters who to vote for.

“As hands-on voting rights groups, we have been witness to some of these problems ourselves,” reads the letter.

Activists from various groups have asked the city to remedy specific allegations of voting rights violations over the past two years. Some of the most extreme violations allegedly occurred in Chinatown in 2003.

“People working for a campaign were sitting at a desk at the Quincy School acting like they were poll workers and telling people who to vote for,” said CPA Executive Director Lydia Lowe. “And poll workers were telling people who to vote for. It was in full view of the warden.”

At the polls at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in the South End in the 2003 final election and the 2004 election poll workers corrected the ballots of limited English speakers, according to Lowe. She said the poll workers marked down their votes for certain candidates, apparently based on whatever campaign flyers voters were holding.

In the 2003 general elections, voters in Chinatown, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester who attempted to bullet vote — to vote for only one candidate instead of four — were reportedly wrongly told they had to vote for four at-large city council candidates.

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund staff attorney Glenn Magpantay said many Asian voters told the group they had been wrongly asked to produce identification.

Partly in response to complaints about the 2003 election, in 2004 the voting rights group MassVOTE conducted a massive poll monitoring effort in cities across the state, including Boston.

In Boston, MassVOTE found inadequately trained poll workers and some polls lacking required translators.

MassVOTE, CPA and Viet-AID reportedly supplied the Justice Department with documentation of observed voting irregularities, material which the department apparently used in preparing its lawsuit.

The city’s chief of policy and planning, Michael Kineavy, would not discuss specific complaints because he said they might be addressed in the lawsuit, but he said that the city has attempted to remedy the problems.

“Our perspective is we attempted to address them or forwarded complaints to the secretary of state who is the ultimate overseer in our elections,” said Kineavy.

Kineavy noted that the Justice Department has failed to provide the city with specific complaints of voting rights violations.

Since the allegations first became public, the city has appointed a new election commissioner, Geraldine Cuddyer. Some voting rights activists say Cuddyer has done a better job of reaching out to them than did her predecessor, Nancy Lo.

“Since the new commissioner has come on I think she’s done a better job, but she has a lot more work to do in terms of providing translation services, poll workers that are more prepared, that are bilingual,” said ¿Oiste? Executive Director Giovanna Negretti.

In recent weeks, the city formed a task force to work with community groups to find and train more poll workers for this fall’s elections. The task force might also work to remedy voting rights complaints, indicated Kineavy.

But the formation of a task force failed to mollify get-out-the-vote groups and others who signed onto last week’s letter.

“The right to vote is too important to fight over, and I think if people have the perception they were interfered with in their ability to vote we should take it seriously,” said Nadine Cohen, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.