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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (11407)	7/11/2001 11:21:52 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

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