The Bush administration has admitted at least something went wrong in Florida. But not much.

The Justice Department says it plans to file suit against three Florida counties for voting-rights violations stemming from the 2000 election debacle. Another suit is planned in Missouri - the state in which Attorney General John Ashcroft just happens to have been beaten in his Senate re-election bid by a dead man, Gov. Mel Carnahan. The seat is now held by Carnahan's widow, Jean.

Another legal action is in store for Tennessee, which is, by sheer happenstance, the home state of the defeated Democrat Al Gore. Make what you will of this symmetry.

The revelation came first from Ralph Boyd, assistant attorney general for civil rights. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that out of 11,000 complaints received after the election impasse - many of them not charges of illegality but gripes about the outcome - the real cases in Florida boil down to just three.

None involves the mayhem created by machines that couldn't read votes properly and resulted, according to several independent studies, in African-American voters being far more likely to have their votes discarded than were whites. None involves Duval County, which encompasses Jacksonville - where, of 27,000 votes that were thrown out, two-fifths were from just three voting districts that are predominantly black.

None involves the infamous statewide purge of alleged felons from the rolls - a purge so flawed that even some county officials and a corrections department worker found their names listed as "felons" to be blocked from the voting booth. An in-depth analysis of the purge by the Palm Beach Post showed it kept 1,100 eligible voters from casting ballots.

None of this figures in the Justice Department's Florida effort, though. Washington and Florida officials say the charges involve failure to provide foreign-language assistance to Haitian and Hispanic immigrants in counties where it is required by law.

Two of the three cases involve providing help at the polls for Hispanics, a group Republicans have targeted for enlistment to party ranks. We are to believe this is not politics but coincidence.

And so the department that is by law supposed to ensure that no election practice results in discrimination - intentional or not - still sees none against Florida's African-Americans. This is what comes out of a building they recently named, with bipartisan fanfare, for Robert F. Kennedy.

It is at least something. All this time, we have been told by Republicans that what happened in Florida in November 2000 was really nothing. Gov. Jeb Bush still adheres to the idea. Told of the Justice Department's intention to sue because some were deprived of their right to vote, Bush said he just didn't believe it was so. "I know of no case where that actually happened," he said.

His brother the president has been mum. George W. Bush's chief complaints about Florida have been that the media called the race too early on election night, and Gore asked for re-counts.

Last year, when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found widespread disenfranchisement of African-Americans and other minorities in the Florida vote, the report was dismissed as partisan hogwash by the two Republicans then serving on the panel. Even the complaints of Haitian Americans and Hispanics were discounted by the dissenters, who wrote a lengthy report attacking the commission majority's findings: "Much of the testimony from advocacy groups was speculative and based on second-hand, anecdotal information," they said of the immigrants' concerns.

Now the Justice Department at least takes the immigrants seriously. Lucky for them.

Meanwhile, a broad voting-rights lawsuit brought by the NAACP and other public-interest groups that charges Secretary of State Katherine Harris and other state officials with allowing election practices and policies to disenfranchise thousands of African-Americans in Florida moves forward. It has survived efforts to get it dismissed - no judge has found it lacking in merit.Settlements requiring specific reforms have been reached with Broward and Leon counties; more are expected.

Justice is slowly being served, despite the Department of Justice.

Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.

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