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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Whose Votes Really Didn't Count in Florida?
James K. Glassman and John R. Lott Jr.
On The Issues
November 2001
The latest data on the voting irregularities in Florida during last year's presidential election reveal that African-American Republicans were—by far—the group most likely to have spoiled ballots.
This month, new detailed statistics were released on voting in Florida during the presidential election. The data for the first time include all of the state's precincts, with information not just on race but also on party affiliation. At first glance, the numbers confirm the disturbing claims, repeated often this year, that African-American ballots were "spoiled"—that is, not counted because they showed either no vote for president, or multiple votes—at higher rates than the ballots of other groups.
Rev. Jesse Jackson was not alone in charging "a clear pattern of suppressing the votes of African-Americans." Much less detailed data earlier this year caused the chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to call for a criminal investigation.
On November 12, the newspaper consortium that has been recounting the Florida votes released a report that highlighted the racial disparity in the spoiled ballots, giving a boost to reform bills that are now moving swiftly through Congress to try to remedy the apparent problem. But if spoiled ballots do indicate disenfranchisement, then the new data show that, by a dramatic margin, the group most victimized in the Florida voting was African-American Republicans. We discovered this stunning twist in an extensive analysis of the new figures.
Looking at the Numbers
The new data show that African-American Republicans who voted in Florida were fifty-four to sixty-six times more likely than the average African-American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled. Another way of saying this is that, for every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional spoiled ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African-Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.
These figures control for a wide range of factors that influence spoiled-ballot rates, including education, gender, income, age, number of absentee votes, voting-machine type, ballot type, and whether votes are counted at the precinct or centrally. In other words, 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.
These results are disturbing. They show that, if there was a concerted effort to prevent votes from counting in Florida, that effort was directed at Republicans, not at African-Americans. This conclusion conforms with another fact that the new data reveal: Among white voters, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to have spoiled ballots. In addition, we found that the overall rate of spoiled ballots was 14 percent higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat, and 31 percent higher when the supervisor was an African-American Democrat. So, instead of Republicans disenfranchising African-American Democrats, the new figures strongly suggest that Democrats were disenfranchising African-American Republicans.
Some readers may be surprised that black Republicans even exist in Florida, but, in fact, there are 22,270 such registered voters—or about one for every twenty registered black Democrats. (This is a large number when you consider that the election in the state was decided by fewer than 1,000 votes.) Since these Republicans were more than fifty times more likely to suffer spoiled ballots than other African-Americans, the reasonable conclusion is that George W. Bush was penalized more by the losses of African-American votes than Al Gore.
Critics have also claimed that low-income voters suffered spoiled ballots disproportionately. Yet, the data decisively reject this conclusion. For example, the poorest voters, those in households making less than $15,000 a year, had spoiled ballots at less than one-fifteenth the rate of voters in families making over $500,000.
Conclusions and Lingering Questions
It is difficult to believe that wealthy people were more confused by the ballot than poor people. Perhaps the rich or black Republicans simply did not like the choices for president and so did not vote that part of the ballot. Perhaps there was tampering. We may never know, but, clearly, the figures show that income and race were only one-third as important in explaining spoiled ballots as the methods and machines used in voting. For example, setting up the names in a straight line appears to produce many fewer problems than listing names on different pages or in separate columns.
But, in the end, if there were intentional victims in Florida, they were targeted not because of race but because of party. The irony is that those who screamed discrimination the loudest may have the most to hide.
John R. Lott, Jr., and James K. Glassman are, respectively, a resident scholar and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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