About the 2000 Election

I still run into peo­ple who believe that Bush won the 2000 elec­tion fair and square.

Katie and I did some math today, using fig­ures from that elec­tion. These do NOT con­sid­er the num­ber of peo­ple who were intim­i­dat­ed by road­blocks and the like, or the absen­tee bal­lot issues.

Bush won the 2000 elec­tion in Flori­da by only 537 votes.

179,855 votes were invalidated.
53% of the inval­i­dat­ed votes were by black vot­ers. That’s 95,323 black peo­ple whose votes were not counted.
Sta­tis­tics show that 90% of black vot­ers con­sis­tent­ly vote for Demo­c­ra­t­ic candidates.

That means that there were like­ly 85,791 inval­i­dat­ed votes that were almost cer­tain­ly cast for Gore.

57,700 vot­ers were removed from the roles due to the “felon list.” The vast major­i­ty of the peo­ple on the list were not felons, or their right to vote had been returned to them. A fair num­ber of the “felonies” list­ed were on dates AFTER the election.

90.2% of those removed from the roles as sup­posed felons were black. That’s 52,045 voters.
Using that 90% again, we have anoth­er 46,841 prob­a­ble Gore votes.

Either one of these prob­lems being resolved would have giv­en Gore the elec­tion. Tak­ing the results togeth­er, Gore would have won by 131,558 votes.