A search
"florida black votes" on google yields a lot of links but the truthfullness of each has to be evaluated. The numbers do not match.
The Lynching of the Black Vote
As the New York Times first reported, Florida election officials devised a laptop program allowing local election officials to tap directly into the master database in Tallahassee to determine whether a voter who did not show up on local rolls was in fact registered to vote. But only one of the laptop computers was distributed to a black area.
The Times reported that the precincts equipped with laptops favored Bush. In predominantly black precincts, if a voter found his or her name wrongly omitted from the rolls, a harried polling place worker had to try to get through to Tallahassee on the phone, and the lines were invariably busy. In Miami-Dade, black votes were thrown out at four times the rate of white votes.
It also turns out that many of the blacks whose names were mysteriously disqualified were not purged accidentally. As Gregory Palast reported in the internet magazine Salon.com, Republican officials hired ChoicePoint, an outside vendor with Republican ties, to cleanse the rolls of felons - but at least 8,000 names, disproportionately minority, were improperly deleted.
8,000 (plus however many were turned away in a laptop fiasco) of this source is not 90,000 and who knows how many of them would have voted for the Buchanan or cast an invalid ballot. But a few thousand is close enough to the margin of victory.
Not that I care a bit about the issue in question. Just wanted to point to Grun that abcense of references is not evidence of abcense. In modern world when all it takes is google and five seconds to construct a query, the "What are your sources?" is rarely a good resort but more an indication of doctrinaire closedmindendess. Like "I could find the sources in ten secohnds myself, but since you did not provide them, I consider your argument invalid".
People are not writing monographies here and often do not remember where they read something - sometimes in print media or heard on TV/radio, so the exact source may be impossible to provide. But there is usually supporting information to be found on the web for the willing to try.
Against those who have made their minds citing sources does not necessarily help. They just openly ignore and even laugh at "walls of text", quotes and references.
At best, they would just say that a sourse cited is lying (which often is the case) - but they do not present any evidence themselves that it is lying, only their opinion, while insisting on others substantiating their opinions.
miko
