Man sues county over voting registration

Sito Negron

Friday, Oct. 22, 2004 | 11:08 a.m.

A man who claims his voter registration form was mishandled is suing the county to allow him to vote, an action that added to partisan claims about voter suppression that have placed Clark County in the national spotlight.

Dwight Brandon, 44, said he and his parents registered to vote Aug. 20. A woman wearing a T-shirt with the word "Republican" took his registration, while his parents registered with a different woman, Brandon said in a lawsuit affidavit.

But when he saw television reports that some registration forms collected by a Republican-backed group had not been turned in, he checked on his voter status and found he had not been registered, Brandon's suit claimed.

Brandon initially claimed that his parents -- who are registered to vote -- signed up as Republicans and he as a Democrat. However, they are registered as Democrats.

Republicans used that inconsistency to attack Brandon's story, although the party on Tuesday did confirm that Brandon's parents were registered by one of their field workers.

Brandon said Thursday that the issue is what happened to his registration form, not whether he misspoke about his parents' affiliation.

"This has to do with me," he said. "My rights were taken away."

Republicans also attacked Voices for Working Families, the group helping Brandon, by calling it a front group for Democrats trying to position themselves to challenge the election.

Andres Ramirez, who is directing the Voices for Working Families effort in Clark County, said Brandon's case in not the only one he's heard about.

"About 25 other people have contacted us," he said. Those claims -- from Republicans, third-party voters and independents -- are under review, he said.

The lawsuit was filed on Thursday, another day of partisan attacks in Clark County, with campaign strategists at the highest levels trading charges about who is trying to steal the election.

Similar themes are sounding in battleground states across the country.

Democrats are charging that Republicans have a history of voter suppression, pointing to the 2000 presidential election turmoil in Florida.

"They stole the 2000 election. There's nothing we can do about that," Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe said. "We won't let that happen this year."

The GOP counters that the Democrats worry they'll lose the election and are setting the stage for a legal challenge once their candidate loses.

"Obviously they are doing everything they can to have lawyers undermine the intent of the voters in these elections, to swarm all over these states," Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie said. "We're going to do everything we can to make sure their efforts to tangle things up in legal challenges do not in any way undermine the legitimacy of this election."

The struggle in Clark County reached a fever pitch last week, after an employee with a Republican-funded voter registration group alleged that he was instructed not to register Democrats and he caught a supervisor tearing up Democratic voter registration forms.

Eric Russell, who made the charges, worked for Voters Outreach of America, a Phoenix-based company run by a Republican operative and funded by the Republican Party. The operative, Nathan Sproul, a former leader of the Arizona Republican Party, said Russell was lying because he was in a pay dispute.

There are three lawsuits associated with the Clark County voter fraud allegations.

Meanwhile, early voting is underway. Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax said about 35 people had requested provisional ballots as of Wednesday, out of more than 70,000 votes cast.

"We're not getting inundated by provisional ballots by any stretch of the imagination," Lomax said.