Fiendish Floridians? According to a press
release from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:
"In 2000, African Americans in southern Florida were denied the right to vote and to have their votes counted. In 2002, the gay and Jewish communities are facing the same inexcusable fate," said Lorri L. Jean [NGLTF's executive director].
While irregularities have been reported in precincts countywide, Miami's Jewish and gay communities have been disproportionately hit by voter machine malfunction and other irregularities. -- "How many times must historically oppressed communities be denied the right to participate in elections under the watch of Jeb and George W. Bush?" demanded Jean.
Years ago, there used to be a joke about a hypothetical headline in the old (and, at the time, left-leaning) New York Post: "New York Destroyed; Blacks, Jews Suffer Most." The penchant to claim the mantle of victimhood seems to know no bounds on the left. In fact, the well-reported voting problems in Florida's Dade and Broward counties (that's Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, respectively) have been attributed to the county officials in charge of elections, and these officials are, as it turns out, DEMOCRATS.
Think, for a minute, about NGLTF's suggestion that the brothers
Bush managed to pinpoint the precincts with a majority of gay or
Jewish votes, and then to arrange for election workers in those
exact precincts to be slovenly or ill-trained, and for the
expensive, new electronic voting machines to be improperly hooked
up -- all in order to undermine the traditionally liberal vote. I
mean, just how efficiently fascistic do they really think the
Republicans are?
NGLTF's concern was stoked by a ballot initiative from the
religious right, which sought to overturn Dade County's gay rights
ordinance. Says the NGLTF release:
"In some precincts, there was no ability to vote on any initiatives. In others, voters have complained that when they voted NO on the anti-gay ballot measure, YES votes appear to have registered instead."
Can you spell P-A-R-A-N-O-I-A?
As it turned out, the repeal effort failed 53% to 47%, despite the
great GOP conspiracy, and the gay rights measure will stay on the
books. As reported by the Miami Herald,
racially speaking, the strongest support for keeping the gay rights
measure, by far, came from
non-Latin, non-black voters (in other words, the white
electorate), which voted 73.7% to 26.3% against repeal. Among
black voters, the vote was just barely against repeal, 55.5% to
44.5%. And finally, among the heavily Cuban
Hispanic voters, the majority favored repealing the
gay rights law, 63.2% to 36.8%. Guess that's why NGLTF wasn't
concerned about voting foul-ups affecting that minority
group.
--Stephen H. Miller