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A Democratic National Committee manual instructs
activists, in the true spirit of Florida 2000, to
allege voter intimidation even in the absence of
evidence.
Right on cue, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference has floated wispy tales of the harassment of
black voters in Florida.
The Florida lie
By Rich Lowry
It's already starting. Democrats are pumping up the
volume on behalf of an insidious lie: Evil forces
deliberately disenfranchised black voters in 2000,
especially in Florida, and are already doing it again
this year.
John Kerry has said, "Never again will a million
African-Americans be denied the right to exercise their
vote." Jimmy Carter who never hesitates to smear the
country whose highest office he once occupied has
made similar noises. Hyperbolic Democratic honcho Terry
McAuliffe will travel next week with Jesse Jackson and
Al Sharpton, who never miss an opportunity to tell
black audiences that the age of Jim Crow is still here
when it comes to disenfranchisement.
The Kerry salvo about a million black voters is a wild
extrapolation based on the falsehood that in 2000
blacks were disenfranchised in Florida and then
assuming proportional numbers were disenfranchised in
every other state. The million number is highly
convenient since it is the threshold for a sound bite
really to bite. Kerry, for instance, will never say on
the stump that the economy has lost a net 600,000 total
jobs during the past four years, sticking instead with
a statistic that keeps the figure over a million.
What happened in Florida in 2000 is some voters spoiled
their ballots, voting for two candidates or not making
a discernible mark on their ballot. This happens in
every election, but these mistakes were magnified in
Florida because of the scrutiny that came with Bush's
500-vote margin. Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a one-man truth
squad about the Florida controversy, estimates the rate
of spoilage in Florida at roughly 3 percent.
That is similar to the 2.6 percent rate in 1996, when
Democrats failed to scream about disenfranchisement.
The spoilage rate in heavily Democratic Chicago in 2000
was almost 6 percent, double that of Florida. The sad
fact is, according to Kirsanow, ballots tend to be
spoiled more in low-income areas (white or black),
areas where many people haven't graduated high school,
and areas where there are a large number of first-time
voters.
Democrats took this sociological datum, which applies
everywhere around the country, and spun from it a
conspiracy theory in Florida blacks were kept from
voting, "disenfranchised." The first problem with this
feverish notion is that the county supervisors who
conduct the elections and would have had to do all the
disenfranchising in the black areas with high rates of
spoilage were almost all Democrats.
The more specific allegations of attempts to
disenfranchise blacks are paranoid urban legend. No one
has produced any evidence of the dogs and hoses some
activists have said were used to keep blacks from the
polls and if Bull Connor had really been loose in
Florida, people would have noticed. Another allegation
involves the so-called "felon purge list," which was
meant to keep felons from voting. It had significant
errors and hindered some legitimate voters at the
polls, but the list wasn't a deliberate racist act.
According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 42
percent of the people on the list were black. But 48
percent of convicted felons in Florida are black. It
turned out that roughly 6,000 felons correctly on the
list were allowed to vote illegally anyway.
Kerry et al. want to play on the primal fears of black
voters, convincing them that the American electoral
system is fundamentally corrupt. The 2004 election has,
therefore, achieved the status of being pre-stolen if
Bush wins, he ipso facto stole it. A Democratic
National Committee manual instructs activists, in the
true spirit of Florida 2000, to allege voter
intimidation even in the absence of evidence. Right on
cue, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has
floated wispy tales of the harassment of black voters
in Florida.
All of this is so tawdry. But nothing is beneath
hucksters who know that the positive merits of
Kerry [What merits??] are so uninspiring that they
have to resort to gutter tactics to try to get him
elected, lying to black voters in the process.
2004, King Features Syndicate
Posted by Permission
--
LP
"We are fighting today for security, for progress,
and for peace, not only for ourselves but for all
men, not only for one generation but for all
generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world
of ancient evils, ancient ills."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
State of the Union Address - 1942
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