WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND VOTING 39

This essay may raise a few hackles, especially on the distaff side of the human spectrum. Don’t blame the messenger – I just try to go where the data lead.

For a long time there has been speculation by economists such as Dr. John Lott and others why the government began growing when it did. Excluding wartime, the federal government comprised 2% to 3% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) until WWI. In the 1920’s non-military federal spending began steadily growing. There is a widely held premise that the growth of the federal government was caused by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to counter the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This is demonstrably not true (see my essay FDR). What can be logically postulated is that the growth of federal spending was triggered by women’s suffrage. Let me attempt to make that case.

In his 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, economist Dr. John R. Lott states that women have voted differently from men as has been shown by polls for many decades. In the presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 the difference in the political parties men voted for compared to women was in double digits in six of those seven elections, culminating in a 22% margin in 2000. Naturally women voted for Democrats and men for Republicans for reasons I will explain. If women’s votes had been excluded (perhaps a not unwarranted pretermitted action – don’t get riled, just joking) Republicans would have won every presidential election but one from 1968 – 2004 (1996 being the exception).

On average women are more risk averse than men and therefore they are more supportive of government programs to attempt to insure against certain risks. Yes, we all know women who don’t hesitate to take chances in sports and other aspects of life far more than some wimpy men, but I am referring to averages. Single women whose income is lower than their single male counterparts tend to vote for the political party (Democrat) which favors higher income taxes. When these same women marry and their husband’s or their combined incomes rise, they tend to shift to the Republican Party.

The 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. That is not when the majority of women in this country was allowed to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in some Western states (Wyoming 1869; Utah 1870; Colorado 1893; Idaho 1896). Eight more states granted this right from 1910 to 1914, and another 17 states from 1917 to 1919. Therefore women in 29 states could vote before the 19th amendment became the law of the land.

As women voted in greater and greater numbers the size of government expanded. The question is did women’s suffrage cause the expansion of government or did some other political or social change cause government to expand? Happily there is a circumstance which provides a unique answer. Of the 19 states which had not passed laws granting women the right to vote, nine approved the constitutional amendment while ten had it imposed upon them. If some other factor caused both a desire for larger government and a desire for women’s suffrage, then government should have grown only in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. But this was not the case – after the approval of women’s suffrage, a similar growth pattern was seen in both groups. This is an important point so allow me to elaborate. Assume an unknown event ‘A’ causes both the presumed independent events of ‘B’ a desire for women’s suffrage and ‘C’ a desire for an expansion of government. If this situation occurred then for the states which did not exhibit a compelling velleity for suffrage there would be no logical reason for a concomitant expansion of government.

There is a great deal of genuine confusion and indeed obfuscation concerning the 2000 presidential election. The Democrat left came out with the mantra that ‘Bush was selected, not elected.’ That is bogus; however it is legitimate to say that Bush was an accidental president. I will explain. The Bush/Cheney ticket won Florida by 537 votes and therefore all of Florida’s electoral votes and with it the presidency. In my opinion the Al Gore team made a strategic mistake in calling for three heavily Democrat voting precincts for recounts instead of opting for a recount in the whole state. Their idea was that they would have a better chance of gaining the necessary votes in the selected precincts rather than in all precincts – still if they had called for a complete state recount, after all, every vote in Florida was equal, the Republicans could hardly have objected and, who knows, the outcome might have been different.

After several weeks of ill tempered arguing, quibbling, quarrelling, hassling, name calling, and unseemly ad captandum vulgus between the Republicans and Democrats the Florida Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, declared the recount over according to her interpretation of Florida law with the vote margin down to, if I remember correctly, 367 in favor of Bush/Cheney. Quite naturally the Democrats appealed to the Democrat dominated Florida Supreme Court which ruled that the recount should go on. The Republicans in turn appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which, and this is what many people forget, voted 7-2 (with only the doctrinaire liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens descending) to remand the case, Bush v. Gore, back to the Florida Supreme Court for that court to uphold Florida law. Despite a warning by the Democrat Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, the full court ignored what the U.S. Supreme Court had said and ruled that the recounting could go on.

When the case was again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court this time the ruling was to end the recount with the breakdown 5 to 4 on a political basis with the four liberal members, Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer voting to allow the recount to go on. The official vote count difference then went back to 537. A month or two after the final Supreme Court decision, the Miami Herald, CBS, and the New York Times reviewed the results of the election in Florida and could find no evidence that either there was widespread fraud or that a recount would have given the election to the Gore/Lieberman ticket. Therefore the original voting result, the recount, and a postmortem by a hardly conservative news media consortium all gave the election to Bush/Cheney. It may be fairly stated that Bush was an accidental president in that the vote difference in over 7,000,000 votes cast was within the margin of error by any system of voting, be it paper ballots, punch cards, optical scan ballots, or electronic machine voting.

Did voter fraud and voter discrimination occur during the 2000 election in Florida? The answer is yes. There has never been a national election or perhaps any state or local election where voter fraud has not occurred. And in Florida in 2000 it did, although it was not what you may think.

In every election there is a problem called “non-voted” ballots. This is where there is either a vote for more than one candidate in a single race or for none. In Florida’s 2000 election, among others, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Mary Francis Berry, then chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Right Commission, claimed there was a clear pattern of suppressing the African-American vote. They were right, but not in the way they alleged. There were 22,270 registered African-American Republicans voters in Florida in 2000 - about one for every 20 registered African-American Democrats. The African-American Republicans were 54% to 66% more likely than the average African-American voter to have a ballot declared invalid. Additionally, the over-all rate of non-voted ballots was 14% higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat and 31% higher when the supervisor was an African-American Democrat. It would appear that George W. Bush was hurt more by the loss of African-American votes than was Al Gore.

The news media made early presidential calls in 1980, 1996, and 2000. During the Republican landslide victory in 1980, NBC named Reagan the winner well before voting was closed on the West Coast. In the 1996 election contest between Clinton/Gore and Dole/? (Who was the Republican vice-presidential candidate? Yes, it was Jack Kemp), now it was the Republicans turn to cry foul because the TV networks called the elections for Clinton before the pools closed on the West Coast. Given the size of both election victories it is highly unlikely that the outcome of either was affected. In the 2000 election all of the major networks erroneously declared that the Democrats had won Florida and further stated that the polls in Florida were closed. But all of the polls were not closed. The 10 counties of the western Florida Panhandle were on Central time, not Eastern time like the rest of Florida. Calling the Florida election an hour before those polls were closed doubtless caused some voters in the heavily Republican western Panhandle to forgo voting. Democrat strategist Bob Beckel estimated that the early news media call cost Bush 8000 votes. Comparing the drop off rate in voting in that last hour in the western Panhandle counties with the rest of Florida and with past elections yields an estimated loss of circa 7500 votes for Geo. W. Bush. As in 1980 and 1996 the result of the election in 2000 was not altered by the early calling of voting by the news media, but the margin of victory might have been large enough to have spared the country and the political parties the anguish which resulted. I rest my case.