Now, yes, a lot of the black voters in Florida in 2000 were voting for the first time in a long time, if not in their entire lives. And an unacceptable number of Florida’s blacks are poorly educated. But there’s more to it than that. And perhaps the first one to discover this and point it out was Philip A. Klinkner, Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College in New York State. His statistical analysis of Florida’s spoiled ballots reveals some interesting insights.

Klinkner wanted to be sure he was taking all possible explanations into account in trying to determine why so many of Florida’s votes never got counted. So in addition to looking at the race of the voter, Klinkner accounted for the following variables in his analysis:

• Average income in each precinct
• The percentage of voters who were voting for the first time in each precinct
• The percentage of blacks who were voting for the first time in each precinct
• The education level in each precinct
• The education level of blacks in each precinct
• The type of voting system used in each precinct
• The voter turnout in each precinct
• The size of each precinct
• The age of the voters in each precinct
• The political party of each county’s elections supervisor
• Whether each precinct was in a rural county, an urban one or suburban one

Klinkner took the data on these and a few other variables and ran them through his computer to come up with a statistical model which explained what the most likely reasons for a ballot being uncounted were. What his model showed is that being black increased your chances of casting a ballot that never got counted more than any other variable. Rich or poor, educated or not, first-time voter or voting for years. None of these things affected the likelihood of your ballot being spoiled as much as WHETHER OR NOT YOU WERE BLACK. Now yes, those other variables, along with the type of voting system used (punch card, touch screen, etc.), did play significant roles in explaining why some people’s ballots were spoiled and never counted. But none of them were as important as the race of the voter.

The New York Times conducted its own analysis in late 2001 and came to the same conclusion. They found that when you looked just at precincts that had high levels of education (30% or more of the population have college degrees), if the precinct was mostly black, 3.7% of the ballots were spoiled. But if the precinct was mostly white, only 1.9% was spoiled. Among low-education precincts (average education less than 9^th grade), mostly black ones had spoilage rates of 10%, while mostly white ones had spoilage of only 5%. Among precincts that used the confusing "butterfly" ballots, mostly black ones had 18% spoilage rate, while mostly white precincts had only 6% spoilage. A group of Florida newspapers did its own analysis and two out of the three experts they contacted came to the same conclusions (the third one suggested that ballot design and type of voting equipment were more important than race in causing rejected ballots.)

The implications of these findings are clearly serious. They suggest that either black people, regardless of their level of education, are simply less capable of voting correctly than white people, or something was done to the ballots of some black voters at some point in the process to make more of them unreadable. I happen to be of the same mind as Adora Obi Nweze, President of the Florida Chapter of the NAACP, who says, "I don’t think black people know less about how to vote than anyone else."

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