Justice Dept. accuses city of voting rights violations

The US Department of Justice accused Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the City of Boston yesterday of denying the rights of Hispanic and Asian-American voters with limited English skills, and said it would seek federal oversight of city elections until 2007.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday, the Justice Department alleges that the city and its poll workers interfered with voters' rights by ''improperly influencing, coercing, or ignoring the ballot choices of limited English proficient Hispanic and Asian-American voters" and of generally ''abridging" their voting rights by treating Hispanic and Asian voters disrespectfully at the polls and by failing to provide adequate translation services for them.

The lawsuit says the Justice Department has been urging the city to comply with the Voting Rights Act since 1992, spanning a period when the city's Hispanic and Asian populations have swelled, making the groups a potentially formidable political force. Justice Department lawyers contend that the city has failed to respond to repeated requests to improve the city's treatment of Hispanic and Asian voters with limited English skills. It does not provide specific instances of violations of voters' rights.

''The violations of the Voting Rights Act that we discovered in Boston are deeply disturbing, and there is no place for such misconduct in 2005," Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a prepared statement released yesterday. ''Furthermore, despite having had an unequivocal obligation -- for 13 years -- to provide Spanish language information to voters who need it . . . the City of Boston has consistently fallen well short of the mark."

Under the Voting Rights Act, if more than 10,000 of a city's voting-age citizens are members of a single-language minority with limited English skills, all elections materials must be available in their first language. The city is required to offer all ballots and instructions in Spanish for the 34,000 Hispanic citizens of voting age in Boston. The federal law also forbids officials from imposing any requirement or procedure that denies or abridges the rights of minority citizens to vote.

To remedy the alleged violations, the suit asks the US District Court in Massachusetts to order the city to ''devise and implement a remedial program" to assist Hispanic and Asian-American voters and to appoint federal examiners to watch all elections held in Boston until Dec. 31, 2007. In addition, the suit asks that the city be ordered to pay the costs of the lawsuit and that the court ''award such other equitable and further relief."

City and state officials were angered by the suit yesterday, and vowed to challenge it.

Menino, who is running for reelection this year, declined to comment. His top aide disputed the accusations.

''There is not one substantiated allegation in this complaint," said Merita Hopkins, the mayor's chief of staff and corporation counsel. ''What they conclude in this complaint is completely contrary to the Menino administration. The mayor would never tolerate any disrespect for voters, and the Elections Department constantly emphasizes diversity in its training sessions with poll workers."

Hopkins stressed that the lawsuit cites no specific instances of polling-place misconduct to back its allegations and that the city would challenge the suit on that basis. She said the city has made enormous progress recently in guaranteeing that voters with limited English skills have full voting rights.

Community advocates were pleased by news of the lawsuit yesterday and saw it as a means of ensuring that the rights of all of the city's voters are protected.

''Voting is a right for all citizens, English speakers and non-English speakers alike," said Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts. ''It has come to our awareness that non-English speakers have had problems with inadequate translations. Those things just can't happen. That is something that needs to be addressed."

''My hope is that the suit will lead to changes in the way elections are run," said Juan Martinez, executive director of the voter advocacy group MassVOTE.

The lawsuit follows allegations by community advocates that some minority voters have been disenfranchised at polling places in Boston. In 2002, rival campaigns in a legislative race in Brighton accused the other's translators of coercing voters into casting ballots for their candidates. In 2003, an inquiry by Secretary of State William F. Galvin detailed violations of voting regulations in Chinatown during a municipal election, including understaffed polling places, a shortage of polling booths, and inadequate privacy for voters casting ballots.

In March, observers from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division were stationed at polling places in special elections in the city's 12th Suffolk and 18th Suffolk districts, home to large numbers of Russian, Chinese, and Haitian-Creole-speaking voters.

Lawyers from the Justice Department built their case using complaints from witnesses and community groups and from the violations witnessed by their observers, said department spokesman Eric W. Holland.

Holland said that lawyers from the department have been in contact with the city on its their obligations under the Voting Rights Act since 1992, most recently in March.

''We talked and met with them a number of times and monitored their special state legislative election in March 2005," Holland said. ''We brought specific problems to their attention on election day, to little effect."

He did not respond to a request from the Globe to provide details of the allegations.

City officials said Justice Department lawyers have rushed into a lawsuit to force compliance with requirements they have not made clear.

''They've given us no opportunity to be advised of what their facts are, no opportunity to investigate it ourselves," Hopkins said. ''They've given us no opportunity to work with the Department of Justice like we do all the time with the Secretary of State's office to correct anything that needs to be corrected. They should be concerned with compliance, not with suing."

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has filed 26 suits to correct mistreatment of voters with limited English skills at the polls since 1975. Very few defendants fight the suits, Holland said. ''Almost all cases have been settled by consent decrees."

The city had been making great efforts to address concerns over voters with limited English skills recently, Hopkins and others said.

The suit ''is without merit, at least in the present situation," Galvin said. ''There is no factual basis for what they've alleged. This is not to say 20 years ago there might have not been issues, but whatever issues have arisen in recent years, there has been a good-faith effort to remedy them."

For the preliminary city election on Sept. 27, the city will have all materials translated into Spanish and many materials available in Chinese, Vietnamese, Haitian-Creole, and Cape Verdean, officials said. The city has made provision for more Spanish bilingual poll workers, tapping community organizations and academic and business communities to provide personnel. It will also retain a pool of Spanish-speaking poll workers to be dispatched to places where they are needed and a translation bank for speakers of other languages. The Elections Department website was recently translated into Spanish, but Menino spokesman Seth Gitell declined to say how recently that happened.

Martinez said MassVOTE had been working much more closely with the city's Election Department recently, particularly since the new commissioner, Geraldine Cuddyer, was appointed last November. But Martinez said that, whether or not the city challenges the Justice Department lawsuit, there is no way to know if its electoral policies have improved without seeing them in action.

''Till you see people at the polls where they're supposed to be providing translation services in a nonpartisan, noncoercive way, that's the only telling sign," said Martinez. ''We can answer that only on Election Day."

Donovan Slack of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.