Last Sunday, speaking at East Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a
predominantly black congregation in Cleveland, John Kerry
insinuated that Republicans were deliberately attempting to
suppress the black vote. “In battleground states across the
country, we’re hearing stories of how people are trying to make it
harder to even register,” he said. “We’re not going to let that
happen because the memories of 2000 are too strong. We’re not going
to allow one million African Americans to be disenfranchised.”
This isn’t the first time Kerry has alleged that a million black
voters were denied their voting rights in 2000. He cited the
statistic at a speech before the NAACP last July.
The proper response to Kerry’s allegation, of course, is: Name
one. Just one, one single name, one black citizen who was
registered to vote, entitled to vote and prevented from voting in
the 2000 presidential election.
Well, Senator?
What makes Kerry’s charge so insidious, beyond its falsehood, is
that it plays to the paranoia of African Americans and plays off of
two virtual certainties this November: 1) African Americans will
vote overwhelmingly against George W. Bush; and 2) African
Americans will spoil their ballots in disproportionate numbers
compared with non-black voters.
The first point, I trust, is uncontroversial. More than 90
percent of black voters preferred Al Gore to Bush in 2000; recent
polls suggest Bush has cut slightly into that deficit against
Kerry, but he’ll still be lucky to get 20 percent of the black
vote.
The second point — that African Americans will spoil their
ballots in disproportionate numbers — is sad but eminently
predictable. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which
studied the 2000 presidential election, found that the rate of
spoiled ballots consistently tracks, on a county by county level,
with the percentage of black population. The trend is nationwide.
As the black population in a county increases, so does the
percentage of spoiled ballots. According to Michigan congressman
John Conyers, this constitutes “overwhelming evidence that
disparate procedures and antiquated machinery have a
disproportionate racial impact.”
If the procedures and machinery were indeed the problem, the
remedy would be straightforward. But there’s no data to support
Conyers’s claim. In fact, studies by researchers at Harvard and the
University of Wisconsin have determined that the rate of ballot
spoilage in counties with large black populations remains
disproportionately high regardless of what voting technology is
used.
The more probable explanation for higher ballot spoilage rates
among African Americans is the politically incorrect one — namely,
lower literacy skills. The U.S. Department of Education’s Adult
Literacy Survey defines the lowest literacy category as readers
unable to make “low-level inferences based on what they read and to
compare or contrast information that can easily be found in [a]
text.” National data indicates that 38 percent of African Americans
fall into this category, versus only 14 percent of whites. In order
to cast a countable vote, a voter must read and follow a set of
rudimentary instructions. (These instructions may be provided
verbally by an election worker — though the embarrassment of
asking is no doubt considerable.) Lower literacy skills are
therefore the likeliest factor in accounting for higher ballot
spoilage rates among blacks.
But statements like Kerry’s — which lend credibility to the
common myth of sinister forces conspiring to deny African Americans
their civil rights — only compound the problem, transforming the
act of casting a ballot from a moment of civic pride and optimism
into a moment of heightened anxiety and despair. Paranoia
undermines performance as well.
So what does it all mean for the 2004 presidential election?
Three things: 1) African Americans, in overwhelming numbers,
will vote against George Bush; 2) African Americans, in
disproportionate numbers, will screw up their ballots. 3) If George
Bush is re-elected, African Americans will continue to believe,
falsely, that the system is rigged against them.
Shame on you, Senator Kerry.
