By Tim Wheeler

People's Weekly World

The nonpartisan National Task Force on Election Reform (NTFER) has called on the U.S. Justice Department to immediately appoint investigators to interview thousands of voters, including many in Florida, who complained that they were denied the right to vote in last November's disputed presidential election.

The 37-member NTFER, election officials from across the country, including three from Florida, were selected by the Houston-based Election Center.

They released their report during a National Press Club news conference in Washington Aug 9. The task force declared that allegations in the June report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission of widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters "are serious and must be investigated."

"Some allegations were that a systematic process occurred in election 2000 which ... had the effect of disqualifying voters or discouraging voters from participating in the electoral process," the task force continued.

The report said that "this issue is too important to allow it to go uninvestigated. The U.S. Department of Justice should interview all voters who made complaints to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and determine the veracity of the allegations. It is important that the U.S. Justice Department appoint investigators immediately."

A Justice Department spokesman, Dan Nelson, admitted that since the November election, the Department of Justice received "thousands of complaints from citizens about the election." He claimed the department has investigated all but 12 of them.

Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, voiced skepticism that the Justice Department has investigated the complaints.

"If they have, they haven't done it very publicly," he told the World in a phone interview from Houston. "This is a hot topic. I'm surprised that not a single soul outside the Justice Department has heard of their investigation."

The Justice Department spokesman did not specify the nature of the complaints nor explain how the department resolved the complaints.

The report warns that public confidence in the integrity of the U.S. election system was "eroded as a result of the November election." The task force stated that any disenfranchisement that occurred "must be deplored by the elections community and those responsible must be held accountable."

It recommended that willfully blocking voting rights be classified as a major felony. "What the world saw last November were the blemishes of a process that has for decades been overlooked and under-valued, over-tasked and underfunded."

The panel recommended the restoration of voting rights for all convicted felons who have completed their prison sentences or been pardoned and that the judicial and penal systems be required to inform former inmates in writing that their voting rights have been restored.

This is in response to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' contract with Database Technologies, Inc. to purge the state's voting rolls of 85,000 individuals, among them thousands of persons falsely identified as "former felons."

More than 60 percent of those purged were African Americans, although they are only about 11 percent of the Florida population.

The NTFER report also calls for federal action to establish uniform guidelines on voter registration, election procedures, vote counting and a host of other technical issues. But the report also rejected the widespread allegation that punch-card ballots were to blame for the post-election crisis in Florida.

Dawn Williams, deputy auditor of Marshall County, Iowa, rejected the idea that voters were to blame for the debacle in last fall's election. She blamed confusing election procedures. "The purpose of this process is not to see how well voters follow the procedures," she said. "The purpose is to determine the candidate that people have voted for. The responsibility of election officials with all their expertise is to determine the voter's intention."