Voting For Dummies

No, it’s not a reference to the Democratic candidates.

It’s all about the voters in Florida, who can’t seem to cast a simple ballot. I hope they don’t embarrass the country this time around. Taxpayers’ money would be well-spent on mass copies of such a book.

According to liberal race-mongering hounds, we black folks just can’t seem to do anything right. Check out this paranoid article I found in a paper called In These Times, subtitled Independent News and Views (yeah, OK). Juan Gonzalez writes about the apparent ineptitude…I mean, disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida.

To Bush loyalists [Is he talking about me?], and cynics in general, these statistics prove only that many uneducated black voters haven’t a clue as to what they’re doing in the voting booth — and if they can’t read instructions and lose their vote, that’s their problem. [It's my problem?] It is clear, however, that badly designed ballots in some counties made things worse. [Bureaucratic sloppiness is now called "racism."] Palm Beach’s butterfly ballot is already the stuff of legend. In Duval County, the official sample ballot produced by the county’s Republican canvassing board instructed voters to “vote on every page” and listed all presidential candidates on a single page. But the actual ballot, only half the size of the sample, listed the candidates on two pages and directed, in small print: “Vote appropriate pages.”

In reality, no one in Florida was prepared for the enormous turnout of black voters on Election Day. While 540,000 blacks voted in the 1996 presidential election, this year 893,00 showed up at the polls, a 65 percent increase. That number would have been even greater were it not for the hundreds and perhaps thousands of blacks denied the right to vote because their names did not appear on voter rolls or because they had been mistakenly purged as convicted felons [We just can't seem to cope with life's unfairness]. And of course, it does not include the 400,000 black men who, because of a single felony conviction, are banned for life from voting in the Sunshine State. [Poor felons..., I mean fellas.]

As is typical of liberal hysteria and hype, Gonzalez is incorrect about the “enormous turnout” of black voters, at least according to Frank J. Murray, writing for the Washington Times:

Widely quoted assertions that black voters cast 15 percent of Florida’s ballots in the 2000 presidential election are wrong far beyond any acceptable margin of error, The Washington Times has learned.

Official computerized reports obtained by The Times, identifying each voter by name and race, contradict claims that turnout by blacks has increased by more than 50 percent since 1996. Contrary to all reports, black voters on Nov. 7 constituted 10 percent of Florida’s turnout — 610,616 by actual count, as opposed to estimates that routinely top 900,000.

Simply achieving the widely reported 15 percent share of the turnout of 6,086,109 would require that an unheard of 97.7 percent of all black registered voters had gone to the polls. “People just throw out statistics. Where do they get this stuff? It’s basically a guess,” Clayton Roberts, who heads the Florida Division of Elections, told The Times before the full file was assembled.

The actual 10 percent black share of the votes cast on Nov. 7 rose only slightly from 1996’s official record, when blacks cast 9.5 percent of the 5.4 million votes.

But who cares about facts when there’s racial tension to stir up?

It’s embarrassing that some people seem to think Americans of a certain race can’t make it without cradle-to-grave help. That is racism, folks, but I’m in the minority with that belief. It’s a conviction I’ll take to my grave.

On top of that, now we need a bunch of foreigners standing over our shoulders to make sure the mean white people don’t “disenfranchise” us again. Good grief. Sometimes I think life would be better if I were a fish.

Although a study found that Bush won in Florida, Democrats are still convinced Gore the bore should be sitting in the White House. Peter Kirsanow, writing for National Review, says:

The myth of a nefarious plot to thwart black voters from casting ballots is wholly unsupported by the evidence. Inconvenience, bureaucratic errors, and inefficiencies were indeed pervasive. But these problems don’t rise to the level of invidious discrimination. (There was one case in which a black woman alleged that she was turned away from a poll at closing time whereas a white man wasn’t.)

Much has been made of the “felon purge list,” i.e., a list of those individuals who, under Florida law, were to be barred from voting due to felony convictions. The list had been prepared to prevent the kind of fraud that had occurred in the infamous Miami mayoral election, in which a number of ineligible felons voted.

The list was inaccurate; it included people who shouldn’t have been on it. Thus, the myth holds that the purge list was somehow a tool to deny blacks the right to vote.

But facts are stubborn things. Whites were actually twice as likely as blacks to be erroneously placed on the list. In fact, an exhaustive study by the Miami Herald concluded that “the biggest problem with the felon list was not that it prevented eligible voters from casting ballots, but that it ended up allowing ineligible voters to cast a ballot.”* According to the Palm Beach Post, more than 6,500 ineligible felons voted.

I find the whole Oliver Stone-like conspiracy allegations embarrassing (Did I mention I was embarrassed?). Well, let’s see if the good people in Florida can get it right this time.

I wouldn’t hold your breath.

(Book cover photo and post idea borrowed from my main man Michael over at Ramblings’ Journal)