Voter News Service (VNS) made another monumental blunder that started an urban legend about the FL. Pres. Election - Black voting did NOT increase 50% as reported:
Contrary to all reports, black
voters on Nov. 7 constituted 10
percent of Florida's turnout --
610,616 by actual count, as
opposed to estimates that routinely
top 900,000.
Simply achieving the widely reported 15 percent share of
the turnout of 6,086,109 would require that an unheard of
97.7 percent of all black registered voters had gone to the
polls.
"People just throw out statistics. Where do they get this
stuff? It's basically a guess," Clayton Roberts, who heads the
Florida Division of Elections, told The Times before the full
file was assembled.
The actual 10 percent black share of the votes cast on
Nov. 7 rose only slightly from 1996's official record, when
blacks cast 9.5 percent of the 5.4 million votes.
Among other serious consequences, the mistaken 15
percent estimate helped lead to the inaccurate televised
declarations that Al Gore had won the state, narrowing the
race by discouraging some George W. Bush supporters from
voting in parts of Florida where polls still were open. The
narrowness of Mr. Bush's lead nourished hopes that the
Florida result could be reversed by recounts in precincts
dominated by minorities.
This is great
"In Florida, the black share of the vote grew from 10 to
15 percent of the total, a 50 percent increase," Mr. Bositis
wrote in a scholarly paper published and distributed by his
organization, a widely quoted source for many political
writers and analysts who perpetuated that mistake in virtually
every news report and commentary, including two
commentaries in this newspaper since July 1.
Mr. Bositis said he lifted numbers selectively from the
New York Times, a VNS subscriber that published exit
interview data in its election review issue Nov. 12. He
reacted testily when asked why he would base sweeping
conclusions on partial figures without all the data, which he
said his organization couldn't afford to buy.
"It's my choice. I can do whatever I want. I'm the
foremost authority on black voting in the country. I don't
work for the Census Bureau," Mr. Bositis said.
washtimes.com |
