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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Broken_Clock who wrote (104811)	12/7/2000 9:27:35 PM
From: amadeus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

here is some info: >>. Senior GOP strategists say privately that a key reason the Bush campaign did not ask for a statewide recount was it feared that Gore would pick up more votes than Bush, because of the high rate of ballot spoilage in black precincts. >>It turns out that one reason for the high rate of invalidated votes this election was the NAACP’s massive get-out-the-vote effort in Florida, which brought many inexperienced or first-time voters to the polls. Black turnout in Florida set records – 893,000 African Americans cast ballots on Nov. 7, a 65 percent jump over 1996. “The NAACP did a tremendous job of turnout in Florida,” one Republican strategist said. “But in a way they overachieved, and got people out who couldn’t follow instructions.” >>In the most heavily white precincts, about 1 in 14 ballots were thrown out, but in largely black precincts more than 1 in 5 ballots were spoiled – and in some black precincts it was almost one-third. (By comparison, in the District of Columbia, fewer than 1 in 50 ballots were not counted as votes for president.) >> A computer analysis of election returns suggests there were anomalies in the Florida vote, particularly in African American areas. The more black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes. Some 40 percent of the state’s black voters were new voters, and election experts say they were the most vulnerable to confusion about oddly designed ballots. Moreover, a higher percentage of blacks than whites live in counties with voting machines more prone to not registering a vote. And similarly, African American voters are somewhat more likely to live in areas where poll workers do not immediately check ballots for errors – so blacks were less likely than whites to get a chance to correct their ballots if they messed them up. msnbc.com >Voting machinery played a large role in rejections. Of the 51 precincts in which more than 20 percent of ballots were rejected, 45 of them used punch cards -- 88 percent. Of the 336 precincts in which more than 10 percent were tossed out, 277 used punch cards -- 78 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 43 counties using optical systems was 1.4 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 24 punch-card counties was 3.9 percent. That means that voters in punch-card counties, which included urban Democratic strongholds such as Broward and Palm Beach counties, were nearly three times as likely to have their ballots rejected as those in optical counties. miamiherald.com