Wednesday, July 31, 2002

At the mid-July convention of the NAACP, President Kweisi Mfume drew attention to a "callous, deliberate and clearly unconstitutional effort to suppress" the black vote in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. He was correct, but probably didn't realize he was describing the plight of African-Americans attempting to vote Republican.

In an project to research and verify claims of minority votes being disallowed during the 2000 Florida vote, John R. Lott Jr., and James K. Glassman, resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, found that black Republicans were victims of widespread discrimination.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Lott and Glassman said: "The new finding show that African-American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African-American to have had a ballot declared invalid ..." They also found that ... "Among white voters, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to have spoiled ballots."

They further concluded 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 superior was an African-American Democrat." This suggests that, in addition to suppressing military ballots, the Democrats attempted to disenfranchise Florida's 22,270 registered minority Republican voters.

Elsewhere, columnist George Will writes that the night before the 2000 election, Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri told a Gore-Lieberman rally that a lawsuit would be filed to force the polls to stay open longer than Missouri law allowed.

Such a suit was filed claiming that minorities were having trouble voting. The only problem was that the claimant had died in 1999. Nevertheless, a compliant judge ordered the polls to stay open, while a prerecorded telephone message from Jesse Jackson was already telling prospective voters that poll hours were extended.

Were minorities actually having problems, or was it cover for moving groups of illegal or duplicate voters to different polling places?

It's obvious that we need real election reform to include repeal of the "motor-voter" law and a cleanup of election registration and administration.

William Fielder

Peachtree City

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