Ballots Cast by Blacks and Older Voters Were Tossed in Far Greater Numbers
"The finding about black voters is really strong," said Philip Klinkner, a political science professor at HamiltonCollege who has studied the Florida vote and reviewed the Times study. "It raises the issue about whether
there's some way that the voting system is set up that discriminates against blacks."
There is no conclusive evidence of systematic efforts to discriminate against blacks, but this pattern — the same kind that courts look at in determining racial discrimination in voting rights lawsuits — raises suspicions"
November 12, 2001
THE PATTERNS
By FORD FESSENDEN
From The New York Times
Black precincts had more than three times as
many rejected ballots as white precincts in last
fall's presidential race in Florida, a disparity that
persists even after accounting for the effects of
income, education and bad ballot design, The New
York Times found in a new statistical analysis of the
Florida vote.
The analysis of 6,000 precincts uses far more
definitive data than previous studies and shows a
strong pattern of ballot rejection in black precincts that is not explained by socioeconomic differences or
voting technology. Similar patterns were found in Hispanic precincts and places with large elderly populations.
It did not matter whether the precinct used punch cards or paper ballots, whether the neighborhoods were
rich or poor or the ballot was straight or butterflied. Precincts with more black, Hispanic and elderly voters
had substantially more spoiled ballots, The Times found.
The analysis did not suggest why blacks' ballots were more likely to have been rejected, but critics of
Florida's voting system have suggested that black precincts were more likely to have older, unreliable voting
machines and poorly trained poll workers.
The question of who might have been unfairly disenfranchised by the voting in Florida has been much debated
in the aftermath of the 2000 election. The United States Supreme Court stopped a recount, saying it might
have violated equal protection guarantees that should give everyone the same chance to cast a valid vote.
But the election held substantial deviations from that one-person-one- vote
benchmark. For minorities, the ballot survey found, a recount would not
have redressed the inequities because most ballots were beyond retrieving.
But a recount could have restored the votes of thousands of older voters
whose dimpled and double-voted ballots were indecipherable to machines
but would have been clear in a ballot-by-ballot review.
The possibility that the Florida voting was racially discriminatory is a central
issue in a debate over the Voting Rights Act, which subjects to federal
oversight the voting laws of jurisdictions with a history of discrimination.
Conservatives have argued that discrepancies in disqualified ballots between
the races result from voter errors, not discrimination, and say the evidence
lies in the fact that disqualified ballots are statistically associated with
education and literacy, not race.
The Times review of the Florida numbers showed that education indeed was
a powerful predictor of ballot disqualification. Lower education has often
been associated with mismarked ballots, but the Florida results may have
been especially pronounced. Precincts with large numbers of people with
less than a ninth-grade education had a 10 percent ballot spoilage rate, while
precincts where most of the people have college degrees had a rejection rate
of just 1 percent.
But education was not the only factor. The widespread use of ballots in
which the 10 presidential candidates were listed in more than one column
was associated with thousands of ballot rejections. In the 18 counties that
used such ballots, ballot spoilage was five times as high as in those that did
not.
Yet, even after those factors and others were accounted for, the study showed a significantly higher rate of
rejected ballots in precincts with a large proportion of black voters — in all, 9 to 10 percent lost votes,
compared with about 2 percent for whites. In Hispanic precincts, the rate was 4 percent, but not all counties
reported Hispanic voters as a separate ethnic group.
"The finding about black voters is really strong," said Philip Klinkner, a political science professor at Hamilton
College who has studied the Florida vote and reviewed the Times study. "It raises the issue about whether
there's some way that the voting system is set up that discriminates against blacks."
There is no conclusive evidence of systematic efforts to discriminate against blacks, but this pattern — the
same kind that courts look at in determining racial discrimination in voting rights lawsuits — raises suspicions.
"It raises questions about how they administer elections — where they put the best voting machines, how
many poll workers they put out, what kind of education is done," Mr. Klinkner said.
Alan J. Lichtman, a political science professor at American University, said, "It suggests there was not just a
disparate effect, but disparate treatment — not necessarily deliberate — of black voters in the election." Mr.
Lichtman came to a similar conclusion in a study of more limited data for the United States Civil Rights
Commission.
John Lott, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization, who has argued
that other factors can account for the pattern among black voters, said his own analysis of Florida precincts
showed a correlation between black voters and spoiled ballots but contended it was not discrimination
because it affected black Republicans more than black Democrats.
Because ballots are secret, it is impossible to know exactly whose votes were rejected. But a statistical
analysis of voting patterns and demographics at the precinct level allows some inferences about the behavior
of groups and is far more reliable than similar studies of county voting patterns have been.
Consider the Florida voting districts with high education levels — those in which 30 to 40 percent of the
population has a college degree, in a state where the average is about 20 percent. In majority-black,
high-education precincts, 3.7 percent of the ballots were thrown out. In white precincts with that education
level, just 1.9 percent were thrown out.
At the low end of the education scale, there was a similar pattern. In precincts with relatively high numbers of
people with less than ninth- grade educations, black precincts had 10.4 percent of ballots thrown out, white
precincts 5.3 percent.
Counties that used confusing ballot designs — the infamous butterfly ballot in Palm Beach, and two-column
ballots in 17 other counties — created large numbers of rejected ballots. But again, blacks fared worse than
whites — 18.2 percent of ballots in mostly black precincts where two- column or butterfly ballots were used
were rejected, three times higher than in white areas.
Blacks were not the only voters consistently disenfranchised in the Florida balloting. Hispanics and voters
over 65 were about twice as likely as whites to cast rejected ballots, and the differential persisted in spite of
technology or educational differences.
The Times study shows that the punch-card voting system, often the object of blame for Florida's voting
problems, played only a minor role in ballot rejection rates for minority and lesser-educated voters. The two-
column ballot was a much greater hindrance.
But punch cards did play a large role in disenfranchising older voters, The Times found in reviewing a
database of uncounted ballots put together by a consortium of media organizations. Precincts with
concentrations of older voters had substantially larger numbers of dimpled ballots that could have been
counted in a manual recount with a permissive standard.
The consortium's ballot review shows that at most, about 25,000 of the 175,000 rejected ballots held
evidence of voter intent. Those were proportionally distributed among blacks, whites and Hispanics, so in the
language of voting rights, a recount would not have redressed their disproportionate loss of voting influence.
But a hand recount that allowed dimpled ballots to be counted might have given voters over 65 with spoiled
ballots about a 50 percent better chance of having their votes counted because they were significantly more
likely than other voters to punch a card too gently to detach the perforated chad. In punch-card precincts
where elderly people made up 85 percent of the voters, 1 in 200 ballots held a dimple on which intent could
be determined. In the rest of the state, the number was about 1 in 300.
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