A: The social characteristics of Florida Democrats. The two groups making the most errors were African Americans and seniors, who are core constituencies of the Florida Democratic Party. Seniors probably made errors because of weak eyesight and other physical limitations caused by aging. African Americans may have made errors because of the anxiety they are likely to feel at the polls, where in the not-very-distant past they would have routinely faced threats, violence, police harassment, and worse.
This pathetic excuse overlooks two factors.
1. Seniors, who Democrats might consider a "core constituency", actually gave their vote to Bush. Exit polling revealed a surprising edge for Bush in voters 65+.
2. Any black who explains a voting error as due to "anxiety" is making a truly pathetic excuse. And anybody who attributes any such broadspread errors by blacks to "anxiety" is obscenely patroninzing and disrespectful of blacks.
And, while we're at it, let's deal with this piece of crapola:
During the controversy, [the governor and his administration] collaborated either directly or through intermediaries with the legal and political advisers of George W. Bush to:...(2) bend the rules on absentee ballots to allow improperly marked absentee ballots to be counted;
The obvious reference is to the military absentee ballots. Florida state law reads that absentee ballots must be postmarked on or before election day. Overseas military ballots do not carry postmarks at all. Or, if they do, they are postmarked at the port-of-entry, when received and forwarded to Florida post offices.
Obviously, existing Florida statutes did not effectively deal with this situation. As a consequence, due to legal challenges concerning overseas absentee military ballots in prior elections, the state of Florida was operating under a consent decree which required the counting of these ballots regardless of an absent or out-of-date postmark! Instead, they were to rely on the customary affidavit enclosed, affirming that the ballot was filled out and cast by the deadline.
It's one thing for Professor DeHaven-Smith to assert the unproveable. It's quite another to assert that which is provably wrong!
I was just about to mention this. Thank you.
Not only that, a federal court ruled in favor of counting those ballots which did not have post marks, but they were never included in the final count because the Supreme Court ruled that same day to stop the recounts. This guy is a first class hypocrit. One paragraph he is saying it is illegal to disallow a vote because of a technicallity and in the very next paragraph he is attacking republicans for trying to get military ballots allowed, which were disallowed on a technicallity.