Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris lashed back at her critics yesterday, accusing a majority of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights of producing an inaccurate and partisan report on voting procedure shortcomings in Florida last November that she said was designed as "a battle plan for politicians interested in wielding the sword of racial division."
Harris, honored by Republicans and assailed by Democrats for her role in the bitter dispute over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, made the charges in a written statement she submitted to the Senate rules committee. The panel held a hearing yesterday on a Civil Rights Commission report this month that concluded the presidential election in Florida last year was marked by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" and that faulted Harris, Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and local elections officials for the failures.
Civil Rights Commission Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry testifies on panel's findings that criticized Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and others for election problems last fall.
(Rick Bowmer - AP)
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Commission Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry reiterated those assertions yesterday. She said that black voters in Florida were almost 10 times more likely than white voters to have had their ballots rejected last fall and that "the state's highest officials failed to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."
Referring to herself in the third person, Harris wrote that the commission report was "replete with half-truths and innuendo" and that it "smacks of prejudgment." She also accused the commission majority of "an obviously malicious attempt to poison public opinion" through the leak to news organizations of portions of the report before it was officially adopted.
Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and one of two GOP commission dissenters, testified that the report relied on a flawed statistical analysis to reach its conclusions about the role of race in the rejection of ballots in Florida.
Noting that most Florida counties with high ballot rejection rates had Democratic election supervisors, Thernstrom said, "It it difficult to see how the local Democratic officials could have been tempted to suppress the black vote, which is almost entirely Democratic."
