Yet another example of ballot box discrimination.
Headline: NewsPaper Reports Racial Gap in Voided Illinois Votes
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As many as one in every six ballots cast in the Nov. 7 U.S. presidential election was declared void in many black precincts in Chicago, while almost every vote was counted in some of the city's outer suburbs, The Washington Post reported in Wednesday's editions.
Citing its own analysis, the Post said Illinois had the ``most pronounced pattern'' of nullifying votes in predominantly black areas compared with mainly white precincts.
The analysis found that in many black precincts in Chicago, one of every six ballots in the presidential election was thrown out, ``while almost every vote was counted in some of the city's outer suburbs.''
Voters in Chicago's Cook County confronted an array of balloting complications that may have led them to either accidentally ``overvote'' (punch for two candidates) or ``undervote'' (fail to make a proper punch), the paper said.
The paper said the November ballot card was ``extraordinarily long and confusing'' and voters used rickety punch-card machines that were hard to operate.
It also was the first presidential election in Illinois since the elimination of the ``straight party'' vote, which let people punch for an entire slate.
``Moreover, the GOP-led state Senate prevented Cook County from using a device on its machines that notifies voters of some mistakes and gives them a second chance to cast valid ballots,'' the Post reported.
Election experts say new and infrequent voters are the most likely to be affected by these kinds of balloting problems, the report said.
On Election Day, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a massive get-out-the-vote drive for Vice President Al Gore, and NAACP officials say many of these new voters accidentally invalidated their ballots.
Gore won the state in November.
The Post said ballots were thrown out, or ``spoiled,'' for a number of reasons, including mistakes in voting, and the possibility that some people choose not to vote because they do not like the candidates. But it quoted voting experts as saying they doubted this explained why more black ballots than white went uncounted.
The Post said its analysis suggested Democrats had lost votes, and possibly elections, in Cook County for years, because large numbers of ballots cast by blacks were not counted.
Cook County was among the jurisdictions using decades-old punch-card machines. While in past presidential elections, Cook County averaged a nullified vote rate of 2 percent, this time it was 5 percent, the Post said. |
