This is not paranoia. African Americans and others demonstrating throughout this country are seeing their worst suspicions realized. National press reports have confirmed what the realists among us have known and have had validated by sworn affidavit after sworn affidavit from thousands of Florida s African American voters. Black votes have been summarily discarded, ignored, discounted, uncounted and miscounted in a frenzy of post-reconstruction revisionism of Article 14 of the US Constitution and Voting Rights Act 1965. In the African American experience it takes no quantum leap from a willful decision to disregard thousands of voters' ballots, made by the notoriously arbitrary Deep South State of Florida, to other all too familiar and unilateral actions denying voters their constitutional franchise.
Blacks recognize the pattern.
There is compelling evidence that African American votes have been a major determinant of victories in 11 states where a potential Bush victory over Gore was reversed by the margin of the African American vote. Perhaps this awareness has driven the apparent voter disenfranchisement in Florida. Michigan, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Georgia and Missouri show a similar pattern with Bush defeating Gore by margins of one percent to a high of nine percent among white voters, only to have these margins reversed when the Black vote is factored in. The media have not yet revealed the exit poll results reflecting Gore s total Black vote comparable to the white voting statistics that have been repeatedly printed in full detail. It is appalling that exit-polling data about African American voters are treated so indifferently.