Bush Bite #1 - 14 Sep 2004
The REAL Y2K catastrophe
Do you remember reading about how Al Gore won Florida in 2000 once the votes were actually counted? Probably not, nobody in the press cared much.
The National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago conducted a careful study of all 179,000 ballots that George W. Bush successfully blocked from being counted. They learned that even with the Republicans' preferred standards of determining voter intent, Gore won Florida.
Of course, that would have happened only if the votes had been officially counted. Thanks to Bush's brother, Governor Jeb Bush, his Florida campaign chair, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and the United States Supreme Court, the counting was killed.
Florida law at the time said that in close elections (results within half of one percentage point), a statewide recount is mandatory. Since then, Florida has banned recounts.
It turns out that of those 179,000 uncounted ballots, more than half were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black voter was ten times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter. This is accomplished by having more accurate voting machines in white-dominated precincts.
Florida isn't alone. Of the 1.9 million votes left uncounted nationwide, it's estimated (based on demographics) that 1 million of them belonged to non-white voters.
|
