Tuesday, June 22, 2004
THE GREG PALAST FANTASY: Greg Palast bills himself as "best known in the USA for his reports on the theft of the election in Florida and the connections between the Bush family and the Bin ladins which form the basis for Michael Moore's latest film."

So it wasn't a surprise to see this piece of lame, divisive propaganda appearing under his byline in the SF Chronicle on Sunday alleging a racial conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters in 2000. Palast asserts that of the 1.9 million "spoiled" votes in the 2000 election, more than half (53% to be exact) were cast by African-Americans, even though they make up only 12% of the population nationally.

Palast writes:

While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers.

Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines rejected these because "Al" is a "stray mark."

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter...

This "no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.

Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled. (emphasis added)

Palast paints quite an ominous and reprehensible picture, especially with respect to Florida: an "apartheid vote-counting system" where votes from white-majority counties (think "Republican") are counted and votes from black-majority counties (think "Democrat") are deliberately trashed while a nefarious Republican Governor looks the other way.

There's only one thing wrong with Palast's picture, of course: it isn't even close to being true.

The first problem with Palast's assertion is that it rests on the flawed statistical analysis of the US Civil Rights Commission. For starters, there is no racial data on individual voters, so the percentage of "spoiled" African-American votes Palast cites with such certitude is really an estimate based on statistical regressions of voter registration.

Secondly, the Commission's report emphasized results from county-level analysis and focused solely on the 2000 election without taking into consideration any historical factors such as previous levels of spoilage, etc.

Indeed, the Commission's analysis is constructed to lead people to the same simple, misguided conclusion that Palast proffers: race was the driving factor behind higher rates of disqualified ballots in Florida counties with larger numbers of registered African-American voters.

This ignores a whole host of reasons that may have contributed to higher spoilage rates in certain counties including literacy rates, voter error and standard machine error (which can't possibly discriminate based on race).

Dr. John Lott conducted a precinct-level analysis of disqualified ballots in Florida for USA Today that took into account data from 1996 and 2000 as well as demographic information. Lott found that a rise in a county's black population over time did not result in a similar rise in the rate of ballot spoilage, suggesting that race was not the causal factor at work.

(Ironically, Lott also discovered that the group most affected by ballot disqualification in Florida in 2000 was not African-American Democrats, but African-American Republicans. Though obviously a smaller percentage of the black voting population, they were 50 times more likely to have their ballot thrown out in 2000. Go figure.)

Palast's ridiculous charge of a "apartheid vote-counting system" with partisan motivations also crumbles when one stops to point out the obvious: the officials in charge of the counties in Florida that experienced the highest rates of spoilage were Democrats, and in some cases African-American Democrats.

Abigail Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh wrote in a comprehensive dissent to the US Civil Rights Commission report:

The majority report lays the blame for the supposed “disenfranchisement” of black voters at the feet of state officials—particularly Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris. In fact, however, elections in Florida are the responsibility of 67 county supervisors of election. And, interestingly, in all but one of the 25 counties with the highest spoilage rates, the election was supervised by a Democrat—the one exception being an official with no party affiliation.

The majority report argues that much of the spoiled ballot problem was due to voting technology. But elected Democratic Party officials decided on the type of machinery used, including the optical scanning system in Gadsden County, the state’s only majority-black county and the one with the highest spoilage rate.

No wonder Palast omitted these damning facts. They simply don't fit his fantasy that America is still a deeply racist and oppressive country, and that Jeb Bush and Republicans in Florida actively discriminated against African-Americans, creating a "Jim Crow spoilage rate" that allowed George Bush to steal his way into the Oval Office.- T. Bevan 10:56 am Link | Email | Send to a Friend