What you talkin' 'bout Willis?
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Posted on 12/11/2001 6:07:50 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
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 battles 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."
But, Thernstrom tells Insight, the requested materials were withheld.
Lichtman disagrees. He says the data were available on public Websites, all accessible to anyone who wanted to collect them. "My data are all published," he says. It is "all publicly available data that I used. I also indicated precisely where it could be downloaded if you wanted it in machine-readable form."
But critics say this is the equivalent of saying, "Look, it's all in the library." Thernstrom says, "Those Websites contain a lot of data. The question is what data, precisely, did Lichtman use from these Websites, and how did he use it? There's no way of accurately reconstructing that by going to the Websites yourself." In short, what numbers did he use and how did he use them?
So, with no staff and volunteer consultants, "I'm proud of the work I did" to put together the dissent, Lott says. "I was doing 20-hour days." And Lott's findings are startling. The dissent says: "The [commission] report's central finding — that there was 'widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights in Florida's 2000 presidential election' — does not withstand even a cursory legal or scholarly scrutiny." The dissenting-opinion report also found:
And the Democratic-controlled commission had no intention of discussing any issue raised by the non-Democrats, Thernstrom and Redenbaugh. It even threatened to declare the dissenting report "illegal" because Lott and Stephan Thernstrom had acted as unpaid consultants. According to Abigail Thernstrom, after the official dissent was filed, commission staffers claimed federal election law prevented the commission from accepting work for which it has not paid.
In a July hearing, Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said the commission should begin as soon as possible to "get started discussing these matters," according to Abigail Thernstrom. She and Redenbaugh were directed to work with the panel's general counsel, Edward A. Hailes, to identify, develop and report issues of concern to them.
On July 20, a Friday, at about 7 p.m., Thernstrom received a fax stating: "You did not participate in the meeting General Counsel Hailes had yesterday with Commissioner Redenbaugh. The deadline has passed" to record any dissent. Flabbergasted, Thernstrom called Redenbaugh, who said there was no meeting and no deadline. There had been only a phone call with Hailes indicating they could speak later about any minority view.
Suddenly it was asserted that it would be illegal to publish the formal dissent with the commission's report. Thernstrom and Redenbaugh were given the option of publishing critical material if it did not come from uncompensated consultants, but they refused. Today, the dissent appears only in the index of the commission report.
The flap about foul play by the partisan Democrats in control of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights comes just as Congress mulls how to reform the U.S. election system to ensure fair play and accountability.
As Insight goes to press neither the Florida secretary of state nor the governor's offices have responded to repeated calls for comment. Staffers at both offices said they were unaware of Lott's finding that black Republicans had been the chief target of electoral disenfranchisement in their state. This doesn't surprise those who have complained of the commission's aggressive suppression of dissent and media complicity in disseminating what now have proved to be highly tendentious conclusions.
Chris Jolma is a research associate for Insight magazine.
1) Alan Lichtman is a fraud and should be ignored everytime he appears on TV.
2) One can only conclude that black Republican votes, even though in the minority, were deliberately spoiled by democrats so Algore could steal the election.
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Also, remember the republican governor of pennsylvania who insisted on election night that there was a lot of cheating in philadelphia. Jude Wannisky wrote that in Philadelphia where there are about one million people they also had one million votes, overwhelmingly democrat of course. There was lots of cheating last year.
The cheating is getting worse in every election, in 96 the democrats were caught cheating red handed in socal and in New Orleans. They got away with it both times in that despite the fact that law enforcement had the case made against them, neither was it publicized on tv nor were charges brought in court.
It appears that we are supposed to tolerate this type of cheating. Some people's votes really don't matter according to the political establishment in America, the Republicans themselves won't even make an issue of this. They cower before the truth and then they expect to inspire people.
The logic goes like this - since blacks are a minority, and more black ballots were spoiled, then therefore evil Republicans are responsible even though they live in wholly owned democrat districts. However, black Republicans that had their ballots spoiled live in democrat bastions. Lott has offered evidence on this in previosu articles.
Once the Berry ally, Commissioner Victoria Wilson, has her ticket punched and is out of there, Berry will no longer have the votes to remain Chairperson, or to push any more attrocities through the Commission. And, Wilson's appointment from Billyjeff Clinton clearly states that her term expired on "November 29, 2001."
So it is time to flush this toilet. Maybe flush it several times, because there are some really big chunks in the Commission.
Congressman Billybob
Click and bookmark for Billybob's daily national commentary at 7:30 a.m.
There may have been fraud in Philly, but you can't prove it from the size of the total vote, which was not extraordinary, and was below several recent elections.
When virtually every predominantly-black precinct has "poll workers" punching out the Gore chads in their spare vot-a-matics, this has the primary effect of spoiling presidential ballots cast by anyone in that precinct who did not vote for Gore. Whether or not black Republicans were "targeted" by the Democrat fraud machine is just semantics.
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