Boyd’s letter “more fiction than fact”

June 7, Washington, DC In a letter sent today to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd explained why the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department has closed the vast majority of its investigations into election misconduct in Florida in 2000.

People For the American Way Foundation President Ralph G. Neas called the letter “astonishing” and said the department’s action’s represented “a destructive abdication of responsibility and a breach of faith with Florida voters.”

Neas said Boyd’s assertion that election reforms passed by the Florida legislature effectively addressed widespread voter registration problems and the illegal purge of thousands of voters from voting lists is “more fiction than fact.”

People For the American Way Foundation is co-counsel with other civil rights organizations in NAACP v Harris, a federal voting rights lawsuit filed in January 2001, which does seek relief for the statewide purge and voter registration problems that disproportionately harmed African American voters in Florida in 2000.