Disenfranchised blacks in Florida: new data show that if there were any deliberate efforts to suppress votes in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, it came at the expense of black Republicans

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 31, 2001 | by Chris Jolma

For months following the 2000 presidential election, Americans were told that to ensure the election of George W. Bush the ballots of many black Democrats were disqualified. But now it develops that the highest rate of ballot spoilage for blacks was among black Republicans. The finding is based on detailed data from USA Today provided for analysis to professor John Lott of Yale Law School.

Black Republicans are a small minority in Florida, about one for every 20 black Democrats. But, as Lott pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, "This is a large number when you consider that the election in the state was decided by fewer than 1,000 votes."

The new findings likely would be an interesting footnote to the Florida recount baffles if they didn't explicitly contradict the central claim of a hasty report by the heavily Democratic U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The commission argued that blacks in general had been "nearly 10 times more likely to have their ballots declared invalid." Lott says his findings established that this figure is impossible to verify.

After the recounts were stopped by the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, with Bush declared the victor, commission hearings were held to determine just what had happened. The commission "collected more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses ... and reviewed more than 118,000 pages of pertinent documents."

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, was consulted to analyze the demographic and electoral data from Florida. He was paid $300 per hour and given several months and the use of the commission's staff of more than 100 to shed light on what happened there. The findings in the resulting report, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election, were disturbing. In addition to the "10 times more likely" figure, Lichtman found that neither education nor literacy differences made any difference in the outcome: Race was the only factor considered when it came to ballot spoilage.

The commission determined that in 2000 approximately 11 percent of Florida voters were African-American, but that African-Americans cast about 54 percent of the 180,000 spoiled ballots there. The bottom line, widely reported on June 8 when the commission adopted the report, was that the ballots of blacks in Florida were targeted for invalidation. Print media made much of the commission's finding of "widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights" with the implication that Republican Gov. Jeb Bush had defrauded blacks and Democrats to steal the presidential election for his brother George W.

But the new data show that if there was any deliberate effort to suppress votes, it was "not because of race but because of party," Lott reported in a recent Los Angeles Times article. He reveals that a "wide range" of factors influence spoiled-ballot rates, including "education, gender, income, age, number of absentee votes, voting-machine type, ballot type and whether votes were counted at the precinct or centrally." But it is the "isolated fact of being a Republican that makes an African-American vastly more likely to have his or her ballot declared invalid" than by any other identifiable standard.

Critics say this confirms that the Democrat-led commission was not seeking the truth but was making partisan propaganda. In fact, according to two commission members, Republican Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and independent Russell Redenbaugh, partner and director of the investment-management firm Cooke & Bieler, the commission report was compiled without their knowledge or participation until it was a fait accompli. Both dissented from the findings of the final report.

Before a report is issued, the commissioners first must vote to approve it, Thernstrom tells INSIGHT, adding that it is customary to circulate drafts among the commissioners well before the vote to ensure careful consideration. However, Thernstrom and Redenbaugh weren't given copies of the 200-page election report until three days before it was to be voted on by the commission. Worse, it was leaked to the Washington Post and New York Times a full day before either of them was given a copy.

On June 8, the commission voted 6-2, along party lines, to adopt the report. Thernstrom and Redenbaugh immediately began preparing a dissent, which by custom would have been printed along with the majority opinion.

For nearly a month the dissenters examined the commission's report with Lott and Thernstrom's husband, Stephan, acting as volunteer consultants. Their requests for Lichtman's data, regressions and drafts were declined, Thernstrom tells INSIGHT. She wrote to Lichtman: "I know you understand something of the staff the commission does not; they find that scholars always make available their data to other scholars. In addition, the commission seems confused about what I want, which is obviously the machine-readable data that you used to run your correlations and regressions. I trust you will not let them tell me that such machine-readable data are not available."