Miami Herald
| Gay & Lesbian |
Dade faces suit over petitionsGay-rights repeal signatures at
issue
The lawsuit will name Leahy and the Miami-Dade
Elections Department.
The group also is asking Leahy to resign. If he
doesn't, group leaders say they will ask that he be fired.
``Mr. Leahy has clouded the issue and stalled the
process,'' said Nathaniel Wilcox, the group's co-chair. ``We will not be
silenced in our fight to preserve the moral fiber that made this country
great.''
Eladio José Armesto, the group's communications
director, said: ``Leahy is a corrupt public official by evading the
performance of his legal duties to certify the petitions.''
Leahy was out of town Thursday and unavailable for
comment.
After their news conference, group leaders marched up
to Leahy's 19th-floor County Hall office to present him with a letter
notifying him of the lawsuit. In his absence, Assistant Elections
Supervisor Gisela Salas said: ``We will work with the county attorney's
office, who will follow through when the suit is filed.''
Leahy works for County Manager Steve Shiver, who could
not be reached.
The group's announcement of its plan to file the
lawsuit comes a week after Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Steve Levine left it
up to Leahy to decide whether or not to accept the 23 affidavits. Leahy
chose to reject them, saying that Florida law doesn't outline a process to
restore signatures to a petition once they are deemed invalid.
``The judge told Mr. Leahy to use his discretion, not
abuse it,'' Armesto said. ``He is abusing it by rejecting the valid
signatures of these registered voters.''
The affidavits have become a crucial issue in Take
Back Miami-Dade's efforts to get the referendum petitions certified. The
group is trying to put on the ballot a referendum on repealing a 1998
amendment to the Miami-Dade human rights ordinance, which bans
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The group turned in nearly 51,000 signatures for its
pro-referendum effort. In an initial review, Leahy threw out 38 of 200
signatures. Twenty-three of those people subsequently gave affidavits to
Take Back Miami-Dade attesting that they had indeed signed the original
petition.
The group presented the affidavits to Leahy, who
rejected them after receiving Levine's ruling.
His decision has implications beyond this case,
because it requires signers of any petition who say their signatures were
wrongly disqualified to go to court, instead of contesting it with
affidavits.
In North Miami Beach, for example, a petition for term
limits fell 96 signatures short of the number required for a referendum.
In June, Leahy's office rejected 222 petition signatures -- including
those of two circulators -- because they differed from card signatures on
file.
Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union's Miami chapter, said Thursday that Take Back's legal
basis for suing Leahy seems ``shaky at best.''
``Their allegations appear ludicrous, because how can
Leahy have violated his discretion when he was doing what a judge directed
him to do?'' Simon said.
Jerome Baker, spokesman for SAVE Dade, the gay rights
group opposing Take Back Miami-Dade's efforts, said it will continue its
own challenge to the petition signatures.
SAVE Dade turned in to Leahy what it considered to be
evidence of signature fraud. Last month, agents with the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement confiscated the Take Back Miami-Dade
petitions from the Elections Department. The Miami-Dade state attorney's
office has launched an investigation into possible signature fraud.
As soon as investigators make the petitions available,
Leahy's office will continue sampling and validating the signatures.
|