FortBendNow.com

Four years of legal wrangling over voting rights issues – and secret negotiations between Fort Bend County and Justice Department officials – may finally be nearing an end.

County Commissioners Court members are scheduled to meet in closed session Tuesday afternoon to discuss a “contemplated litigation/settlement offer: United States Department of Justice, Administration of Elections.”

County Judge Bob Hebert said he couldn’t discuss details of any proposed settlement until after the court hears County Attorney Roy Cordes Jr.’s presentation of it on Tuesday.

However, Hebert acknowledged the proposed settlement involves a long-running effort by the DOJ to make certain that all Asian and Hispanic voters in Fort Bend County have the same ability to cast ballots and obtain election information as residents whose first language is English.

“There are no issues of systemic intent to disenfranchise anybody,” in Fort Bend County, Hebert said. “No suit has been filed. There are just allegations” involving multi-lingual ballots and the U.S. Voting Rights Act.

Hebert said the allegations involve “a number of elections” but “very few” instances of alleged violations of the act. But the county judge said he agrees with Justice officials that any number of violations of the Voting Rights Act is too many.

Fort Bend County’s dispute with the Justice Department could represent one of the longest-running secret actions in county government history. Hebert acknowledged Monday that talks between county and DOJ personnel began in 2004.

Two months after FortBendNow was founded in September 2005, the publication broke the first story in the long-running saga, reporting that the DOJ was pressuring county officials to take specific actions to comply with the Voting Rights Act’s bilingual requirements.

Several politically connected sources confirmed in November 2005 that an official with DOJ’s Voting Section had been conducting interviews in Fort Bend County about voters’ rights issues involving people who speak Spanish and various Asian languages and dialects.

The Justice official, identified as Joel Ard, never answered phone calls seeking comment about the matter.

But FortBendNow learned in late 2005 that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had crafted a memorandum of understanding, and that Justice officials had asked the county to sign it earlier that month.

Commissioners Court members did not sign it – and neither county nor federal officials has ever made the memorandum public.

A similar scenario played out in Harris County in March of 2004, but the difference was that officials in that county signed the memorandum of understanding – to “protect the rights of Vietnamese-speaking voters,” DOJ said in a statement. The memorandum and agreement “details the county’s responsibilities in providing qualified minority-language voters full access to the voting process.”

Steps Harris County was required to take under the agreement included hiring someone to coordinate a county Vietnamese language election program and providing all voter registration and election information and materials, including the voting machine ballots, in Vietnamese.

But the situation in Harris County was different than in Fort Bend, Hebert said at the time.

Fort Bend has a more diverse population than Harris County, with a statistically smaller Vietnamese population, and a larger Chinese population.

“You can’t say ‘lets just have a Chinese interpreter available.’ There are over 300 Chinese dialects,” Hebert said in November 2005, just after Commissioners Court voted to hire Austin law firm Allison Bass & Associates to assist the county in the Justice Department dispute.

In 2004 and 2005, 11 U.S. counties and cities that refused to sign memorandums of understanding – apparently bearing some similarity to the one aimed at Fort Bend County – had claims filed against them by the DOJ, under minority language provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That happened most recently in August 2005 in Ector County, Texas, which the Justice Department said was in violation of the Voting Rights Act due to “election practices and procedures as they affect Spanish-speaking citizens of the county.”

Justice Department lawyers said the county, home to Midland and Odessa, had failed to provide an adequate number of bilingual poll workers trained to assist Spanish-speaking voters.

To avoid a lawsuit, county officials there signed a consent decree acknowledging they had not fully complied with the Voting Rights Act, and agreeing, among other things, to provide “Spanish-language assistance” at all polling sites; to provide at least one bilingual election official at any precinct where there are from 100 to 249 registered voters with Spanish surnames; at least two such officials at any precinct with between 250 and 499 voters with Spanish surnames, and at least three such election officials at any precinct with 500 or more registered voters with Spanish surnames.

In Fort Bend County, officials balked in 2005 at the idea of signing the memorandum, saying they had seen no evidence that the county had been involved in any illegal acts.

But by March 2006, Hebert and other officials met with Asian and Hispanic residents and created Spanish and Asian Languages advisory committees in an attempt to provide equitable voting opportunities.

Creation of the Asian group was the first formal step the county took to deal with the complex issue of providing voting material and information to a group making up about 14% of the county’s population, but including people speaking dozens of languages and dialects.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Andy Meyers said at the time that one of the items in the Justice Department’s memorandum would require the county to determine every voting precinct within its borders that had 50 or more people of Asian descent, a provide translation and other related election services to them.

Meyers called that proposal daunting. “You have to find out if Bill Lee descended from Robert E. Lee or speaks a Chinese dialect. Think about that.”

Three years later, Hebert said he believes the county has resolved “a lot” of the issues over which the county and DOJ have been negotiating.

“We voted 200,000 people in the election last November. Technically, if one person had been” mishandled by election officials, “the Department of Justice could have chosen to file suit,” Hebert said. “They chose not to.”

The county judge said he believes “in all likelihood” county officials will wind up signing a consent decree that both sides “feel is fair, reasonable and equitable, and that will take away the threat of litigation” by DOJ.

“Hopefully we’ll put this to rest in the next couple of weeks,” he added.