🚀 go-pugleaf

"Baxter" <lbax01.spamguard@baxcode.com> wrote in message
news:100tj6n8tbb7l61@corp.supernews.com...
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> "Mark Cook" <mcook@prodigy.net> wrote in message
> news:MHzPb.27085$gE3.11970@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
> > "Baxter" <lbax01.spamguard@baxcode.com> wrote in message
> > news:100tats5ikbs89e@corp.supernews.com...
> > > --
> > > >
> > > It wasn't the Democratic Party.  You're attempting to paint the Dems
as
> a
> > > villain.  They're not.
> >
> > It was members of the Democratic Party. The links to the Washington Post
> > article and the fact that the Democrat controlled election board was a
> > defendant in a suit that the canvassing board lost, proves that it was
> > Democrats.
>
> If it was the Democrats, then why were more of Gore's votes tossed than
> Bush's?  Seems to me that if there was a Democrat conspiracy to
> disenfranchise Bush voters, they'd hardly have been throwing out Gore
votes.
> Perhaps you've got your tinfoil hat on backwards?

Of course that is a different subject, yet, that is exactly what happened.
IF you had a Democrat Election Supervisor, you were 3 times more likely to
have your vote thrown out than you were if you had a Republican Election
Supervisor. The dissent of the USCCR asked the same question. How could the
Republicans be blamed for the spoiled ballots when the bulk of these ballots
were in DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED Counties??? Were Democrats really out to get
Gore???

Here is a passage from the dissent:

But which officials were responsible for the conduct of elections in Florida
�s constitutionally decentralized system of government? Power and
responsibility were lodged almost entirely in the hands of county officials,
the most important of them the 67 county supervisors of elections. If anyone
was intent on suppressing the black vote or to �disenfranchise� anyone else,
it would have required the cooperation of these local officials.
Thus, it seems natural to inquire about the political affiliations of
Florida�s supervisors of elections. If the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
seeks to show that the presidential election was stolen by Republicans, led
by the governor and the secretary of state, it would be logical to expect
that they had the greatest success in those counties in which the electoral
machinery was in the hands of fellow Republicans. Conversely, it is very
difficult to see any political motive that would lead Democratic local
officials to try to keep the most faithful members of their party from the
polls and to somehow spoil the ballots of those who did make it into the
voting booth.

The report never asks this question, though it seems an interesting
hypothesis to explore. The data with which to explore it are readily
available. When we examined the connection between rates of ballot spoilage
across counties and the political affiliation of the supervisor of
elections, we found precisely the opposite of what might be expected. There
was indeed a relationship between having a Republican running the county�s
election and the ballot spoilage rate. But it was a negative correlation
of -.0467.

Having a Democratic supervisor of elections was also correlated with the
spoilage rate�by + 0.424. Dr. Lott has found that the ballot spoilage rate
in counties with Democratic supervisors were three times as high as in those
with Republican supervisors (see Lott�s Table 3). Should we conclude that
Republican local officials were far more interested than Democrats in making
sure that every vote counted?

Of the 25 Florida counties with the highest rate of vote spoilage, in how
many was the election supervised by a Republican? The answer is zero. All
but one of the 25 had Democratic chief election officers, and the one
exception was in the hands of an official with no party affiliation.

Dr. Lott provides a fuller examination of the possible impact of having a
Democratic supervisor of elections in his Table 3, and adds another related
variable�whether or not the supervisor was African American. Having
Democratic officials in charge increases the ballot spoilage rate
substantially, and the effect is stronger still when that official is
African American. (All African American supervisors of elections are
Democrats.) Lott estimates that a 1 percent increase in the black share of
voters in counties with Democratic election officials increases the number
of spoiled ballots by a striking 135 percent.

We do not cite this as evidence that Democratic officials, for some bizarre
reason, sought to disenfranchise blacks, and that black Democratic officials
were even more eager to do so. That is manifestly absurd. It is worth noting
for two reasons. First, it nicely illustrates the limitations of ecological
correlations. Would anyone want to draw the conclusion from this correlation
that the solution was to elect more Republican supervisors of elections?

Second, it has important bearing on the question of who is to blame for the
large numbers of spoiled ballots in minority areas. The majority report
argues that much of the problem was due to voting technology�the use of
punch card machines or optical scanning methods that did not provide
feedback to the voter produced a higher rate of ballot spoilage. But who
decided that the voters of Gadsden County (the state�s only black-majority
county and the one with the highest rate of spoiled ballots) would use an
optical scanning system in which votes were centrally recorded? Who decided
that Palm Beach and Miami-Dade county voters would use punch card machines?
Certainly it was not Jeb Bush or Katherine Harris. Nor was it Lawton Chiles.
It was Democratic local officials in those heavily Democratic counties who
made those choices.

It is worth noting that after these findings were mentioned at the June 27,
2001 hearing of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, the Chair
of the Commission on Civil Rights professed to feeling no surprise. The
Commission�s Report, she maintained, had noted that local as well as state
officials had responsibility for the conduct of the election. The report,
though, devotes far more attention to Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of
State Katherine Harris than to county supervisors of elections who have
primary responsibility for election day procedures. Furthermore, there is no
hint in the report that the local officials in those counties that accounted
for a large majority of the spoiled ballots were Democrats who had no
conceivable interest in suppressing the black vote. It is true that the
party affiliation of Governor Bush and Secretary of State Harris are not
mentioned either. But that hardly matters because everyone knows what party
they belong to, while few are aware of the fact that Florida�s electoral
machinery is largely in the hands of county officials who are Democrats.

It is easy, of course, to say with hindsight that Florida should have had a
uniform system of voting and a common technology for all elections. The
Commission recommends that. But if Governor Bush and Republican legislators
had proposed adopting such a system before the 2000 election, we can imagine
the outcry from their political opponents, who would have seen such a move
as an improper attempt by the governor to control election procedures.
Indeed, it might well have been argued that such a decision would have had a
disparate impact on minority voters, since centralizing the electoral system
would have diminished the power of the Democratic local officials they had
chosen to put in office. It could even have been argued that this transfer
of power from officials who had the support of most minority voters would be
a violation of the Voting Right Act, yet another attempt to deprive
minorities of their opportunity to exercise political power!

Furthermore, it is inappropriate to be playing the blame game when there is
no evidence that anyone understood that the use of certain voting
technologies might increase the rate of voter error for some groups. Those
who charge that African Americans were �disenfranchised� in Florida have
never asked why it is that no one raised this issue before the election. If
punch card balloting, for instance, has a racially discriminatory effect,
why had not the NAACP, the Urban League, or any other organization belonging
to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights ever uttered a peep about it
before November 2000? If civil rights leaders had understood that different
voting systems are conducive to different rates of voter error, and that
some can serve to disadvantage groups with below average literacy skills,
why didn�t they raise the issue publicly and demand electoral reforms? If
they did not grasp this fact, it is hard to see why we should assume that
public officials did.

http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/dissent.htm

> ------------
> WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An analysis of a portion of November's votes in
Florida
> for president shows those for Al Gore were far more likely to be
> disqualified because of so-called overvoting than ballots cast for George
W.
> Bush.
>
> The Washington Post reviewed the computer records of 2.7 million votes in
> eight of Florida's most populous counties.
>
> According to the newspaper, overvotes -- ballots that were thrown out
> because more than one candidate for president was selected -- were three
> times more likely to include Gore as one of the choices, rather than Bush.
> The eight counties reviewed included Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.
>
> The Washington Post found that in Palm Beach, 8,000 so-called butterfly
> ballots were thrown out because Gore and one of two other presidential
> candidates -- a candidate listed below Gore and another listed above
Gore --
> were selected.

A legal ballot designed by a Democrat.

> Of those ballots, voters chose a Democrat in the Senate race 10-to-1.
> http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/01/27/florida.recount/,
>
>