Kenneth Blackwell Quotes
They reality is that we have 70% of our voters use a punch card system that I tried to change and that bipartisan resistance in the legislature stopped.
Blackwell, Kenneth. Interview by Wolf Blitzer. Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 28 Nov. 2004.
The voting problems we have had are managerially and technology solvable but politically each solution is perceived as favoring one of the political parties in the particular jurisdiction and therefore there is resistance to the change.
Florida’s vote counting system was extremely primitive and highly subjective, and no one could really ever tell whether Al Gore or George W. Bush ever won the state whose electoral votes determined the election of 2000. The Supreme Court finally decided that Bush would be president, but no one wanted such a situation to ever happen again. Blackwell had better technology in Ohio in the next election but Ohio various techniques were used to keep some Blacks from voting.
Historically, there has been a tendency to make it difficult for the poor to vote and having election day during working hours on a weekday was a very effective day of doing that. In modern times voting hours have been extended to 9 PM in some states so that working people could more easily vote. However, in modern times calls for weekend voting or Internet voting has been difficult to produce bipartisan support as increasing turnout tends to favor one party—the Democrats—over the other.
Al Gore had substantially won the popular vote but needed Florida to win the electoral vote. There had been a series of vote counting irregularities with many people being denied the right to vote to the point that no one was sure who had won Florida. The election moved from the ballot box to the courts and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that there should be some recounts in areas where Bush had supposedly won. The Bush forces and the Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court where the judges all reversed their traditional positions to support the party who had nominated them. Liberals who usually voted to have the Federal government override the states, voted for Florida to be upheld. Conservatives who usually supported the right of the States to decide such things without Federal Interference, voted to overturn the State Supreme Court. There were 5 Republicans and 6 Democrats and George W. Bush won the election by one judge’s vote.
John Kenneth Blackwell is an American politician, author, and conservative activist who served as the mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio (1979–80), the Ohio State Treasurer (1994–99), and Ohio Secretary of State (1999–2007). He was the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio in 2006, the first African-American major-party candidate for governor of Ohio. He is currently a Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment with The Family Research Council.
