I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on Florida voting irregularities engages in unbelievable demagoguery. Dissenting members have shown it's intellectually sloppy and politically biased.
The report ignores facts that are counter to the majority's desired conclusion, that the 2000 election was illegitimate because blacks were disenfranchised in Florida.
But voting machines don't know a voter's race. A third of the ballots had no vote – something many people do either as a protest or for lack of information. Even the commission's says she sometimes intentionally overvotes — votes for more than one candidate. In any case, voter error, whether intentional or accidental, isn't racial discrimination.
On election day, of the 2,600 complaints received by the attorney general, three were about racial discrimination. The league of women voters testified it hadn't received any evidence of race-based problems.
The facts pile up. But you'll have to look in a special appendix on the commission's web site, because they're just too inconvenient for the politically-minded, partisan majority.
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA we know ideas can change the world. I'm Pete du Pont. Next time, pursuing the American dream.