Non-Voted Ballots and Discrimination in Florida

The report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the presidential vote in Florida during the 2000 general election presents two types of empirical evidence that African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote. To reach their conclusion that discrimination had occurred, the commission examined the impact of race on spoiled (or nonvoted) ballot rates as well as the impact of race on the exclusion of voters from eligibility lists because of past felony criminal records. Using extremely detailed cross-sectional data collected by USA Today and less detailed panel data, I find that to the extent that these types of regressions measure discrimination, it is African-American Republicans who were harmed. Indeed, the nonvoted ballot rate for white Republicans is higher than for white or African-American Democrats. The data also indicate that nonvoted ballot rates are highest in those counties where Democrats are the election supervisors.