Better Late Than Never, I Suppose

Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, put out this column a couple of days ago. Approximately half of all "spoiled" ballots in 2000 belonged to black Americans. Just over half, really. One million ballots cast by eligible, registered African American voters were discounted. Moreover, that incredibly high percentage of disenfranchised African Americans was not limited to the southeast. I don't know about you, but I'm glad the liberal media alerted us all to this massive civil rights violation in November of 2000. Oh, wait.

Consider that the population of the US in the 2000 election was about 281,421,906 (the Census Bureau estimates current US population at 293,562,383), and that the 2000 estimate for total African American population was 35,704,124. That means that 12.69% of the US population in 2000 was identified as solely African American. Yet over fifty percent of spoiled ballots came from less than thirteen percent of the population.

Let's further consider what percentage of black voters was disenfranchised. Of the African American population, 24,430,032 were aged 18 or older. Other census data, from the CPS report on Voting and Registration in November 2000. puts the number of eligible black voters at 23,587,000--so this is the number we'll use for the rest of this consideration (the difference in the two is due to the number of non-citizen black people, who are, of course, ineligible to vote). Of that twenty-three and a half million, 15,156,000, or 64.3%, were registered to vote. Of those registered, 12,749,000, or 84.11% of those registered (54.1% of those eligible) reported voting. Those percentages are consistent with the overall national averages in those categories.

Subtract one million of those 12,749,000 votes. That's 7.8% of all black votes gone. And, given African American voting patterns, that means about another 900,000 votes for Gore simply vanished(granted, all of the other million spoiled ballots could have been intended for Bush, but the chances of that are infinitesimally small). With the votes that were discounted in Florida, he certainly would have won that state--rather handily, in fact.

7.8% might seem like a small chance of getting one's ballot discounted. Well, it's smaller than 15%, or 50%, true. But consider this: for non-black voters, of whose votes 900,000 ballots were considered spoiled, the chance of ballot rejection was 0.92%.

Rush Limbaugh once, in the midst of a rather typical racist tirade, said the following about black voters and their concerns: "They are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?"

Uh, gee, Rush, it looks like you do. And all of your cronies in the GOP do, as well.

Oh, that's a real quote, by the way. Just like the time he told a black caller to "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."

Note: Edited for clarity. Also, the "spoiled" ballots disenfranchised over 95,000 black voters in Florida. That number does not include the over 52,000 voters, almost all African American, illegally removed from Florida's voter rolls by Katherine Harris' premeditated fraud. Please, do read the article that link takes you to.