Washington ? The NAACP and other civil rights leaders charged Wednesday that a series of recent events suggest that the Republican Party is mounting a campaign to keep blacks and other minority voters away from the polls this November.

In a new report, the NAACP and People for the American Way cite incidents from Florida to Detroit. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said efforts at intimidation and suppression, once a tool of Democrats in the Jim Crow South, “have increasingly become the province of the Republican Party” as it seeks to counter the overwhelming advantage Democrats enjoy among black voters.

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said that the two nonpartisan groups were attempting to spin unrelated events into a conspiracy, and their motivation was to help Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry defeat President Bush.

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wrote a letter last month to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence McAuliffe offering to send bipartisan teams to precincts to ensure fair play, Iverson said. The offer was rejected. Republicans want every eligible vote to count, she said, and “if Democrats are serious about this, they will join us.”

DNC spokesman Tony Welch said the GOP’s silence on recent events in Florida showed the offer “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” There, the GOP secretary of state was forced to abandon an effort to remove felons from the state’s voting rolls after newspapers discovered that the “purge” list erroneously would have disenfranchised thousands of qualified voters, many of them black. Elsewhere in Florida, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is looking into allegations that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement intimidated black voters in Orlando to scare them away from the polls in November. Democrats and Republicans have long feuded over whether efforts to protect against ballot fraud constitute voter intimidation. But the debate has taken on more urgency in the wake of the 2000 presidential election.

Some studies suggest that as many as 4 million to 6 million voters were disenfranchised in 2000, either because registration problems prevented qualified voters from casting ballots or because of errors caused by faulty, outdated technology. In Florida, the Civil Rights Commission found that black voters were 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a trend that also was found in other parts of the country.

Among the incidents cited in Wednesday’s report: A Republican state representative in Michigan told the Detroit Free Press that the GOP would have “a tough time” if “we do not suppress the Detroit vote.” Detroit is 83 percent black.

In Jefferson County, Ky., the local GOP plans to send poll watchers to Democratic, predominantly black precincts to challenge voters’ eligibility. A similar, 2002 plan provoked cries of voter intimidation after a recruitment flier became public. The flier asked for volunteers to protect Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s campaign against potential fraud by “the black militant division of the AFL-CIO” and the NAACP.