We all remember the 50-50 split of the vote and the long arduous recounts in Florida before its 25 Electoral College votes put George W. Bush over the top by a slim margin. Since then, commentators have bombarded us with opinions of how this makes President-elect Bush weak and without a mandate from the people.

But no one is saying much about where votes came from. Whether there is much of a difference in terms of who voted for Bush and who voted for Al Gore.

Considering that the Census Bureau estimates the black population at 12.8 percent of total population, this makes for some interesting calculations. It becomes much different than a 50-50 split or tie.

For instance, if the black population has the same percent of eligible voters, children under 18 and so forth, as the rest of the country and turned out at the lower figure of 80 percent with most of these voters forming a “block” for Gore (say 90 percent voting for Gore), then the number of white voters going to the polls drops to 37.6 percent. It would also mean that 61 percent of the whites voted for Bush.

If we took a higher turnout for black voters, say 90 percent, then it would take 63 percent of the white population voting for Bush to bring the election to a tie.

The figures get much more skewed if the Latino or Asian minorities also voted strongly for Gore. With Latinos estimated at 11.5 percent of the total population, and rapidly overtaking the African American population percentage, the possible combination of these two minorities for Gore would significantly lower the amount of white participation. Take another look at the above map in terms of areas for Gore bordering Mexico.

Indications are that two out of three adult white people you encounter on the street did not even bother to vote for either presidential candidate in the last election.

Further implications

The Democrats have long been famous for “getting out the vote.” And there is nothing technically wrong with encouraging people to vote or register to vote, even busing them to the polls. But there is something symptomatic of dirty tricks when the turnout reaches proportions of 80 to 100 percent. Especially, when we hear people like Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) and Jesse Jackson complaining that instructions were not in Creole for Haitians in Florida or, in the same state, have people complaining that they were told they could vote and then were turned away by poll workers.

You have to be a citizen to vote. And part of becoming a citizen is the requirement of a rudimentary understanding of the English language. Do we have people in Congress who do not know this?

You also have to register to vote. Some may lose or misplace their voter’s registration cards and present other identification, but when your name isn’t in the records, then the poll workers will quite rightly turn you away. Is this what happened to some of those Florida victims? Were they bused from one precinct to another?

Do you truly believe that other criminal vote fraud will ever be investigated or investigated properly? How about the University of Wisconsin students who proved how easy it was to vote twice? Workers threatened with the loss of their jobs if they don’t vote more than once? Cartons of cigarettes given Milwaukee homeless if they voted? Letters to non-citizen immigrants, supposedly signed by Clinton, and including registration cards? Immigrants quickly nationalized so they can vote? Precincts that stay open an extra hour in selected St. Louis neighborhoods? One that locked so many people away after closing time in Atlanta that it took three hours more to process them? And how about major cities like Chicago, or the wealthiest counties of the nation such as Palm Beach, that can’t afford or don’t want better voting machines? If anyone bothered to look, how many well oiled old keypunch machines might show up in Chicago warehouses?

There will be plenty of investigations of victims claiming they were disenfranchised by the process, that their votes were not counted or counted correctly, but there will be no investigation of systematic cheating to add votes.

It will all be there again for the next election and people like Bill Daley will get another whack at getting out the vote by hook or crook. The current controversies and irregularities will all be forgotten or swept under the rug. And the white population probably won’t show up for the next election either.