Black Mark: The NAACP discredits itself in Florida.

'There were police officers everywhere. Not in plain sight. Some in plain sight. I saw four of them in physical sites, but the rest next to buildings. I saw them behind trees," said Stacy Powers on November 11, recalling what she had observed near a Tampa polling place four days earlier. At the time, she didn't know why there were so many cops swarming the area. Yet she knew they were up to no good when they questioned an old black man who had just cast his ballot. Powers didn't come away from the scene with any names or badge numbers-just an accusation: "I will call it like I see it. It was racial profiling."

Powers explained all this at a Miami forum put on by the NAACP to probe voting-rights abuses in Florida. When she finished, panelist Ralph Neas of People for the American Way thanked her for an "extraordinarily moving and detailed testimony," and asked for an estimate of how many people in her county "were denied their right to vote." Her response: "Thousands." Nobody paid attention to something else Powers said: "I have since found out that there was supposedly allegedly a burglary out in that area." Not even Powers herself thought that exculpatory fact mattered a whit. "It doesn't take 30 officers to go out and investigate a burglary," she said.

It's a weird anecdote, containing few details to support its astonishing central claim-"thousands" blocked from voting!-and even evidence that would appear to exonerate the police. And, for what it's worth, Powers says the cops stopped the black man after he had voted. Other witnesses at the NAACP hearing were not especially compelling, either. Dymen Raimer, a student at Florida A&M University, explained that she registered to vote by mail in September, and that she knew "the deadline was like October something." Her first application was barred because she had listed a post-office box as her address. She was asked to fix it, which she then did and returned the application in the mail. When she showed up at the polls on November 7 "to see if I was able to vote," an election official said that her corrected form had arrived two days late. "So I was unable to vote."

These stories are now on file at the Department of Justice, in a transcript the NAACP submitted on November 16. In a cover letter, president Kweisi Mfume said the offenses alleged by Powers, Raimer, and others "could be reasonably considered an intentional effort to deny the franchise to voters of color." He urged an investigation, and Attorney General Janet Reno dispatched two lawyers to Florida. But that wasn't good enough for Mfume. By the end of November, he was complaining about the "Just-Ice" Department's unwillingness to do more.

Popular history may look back on this election not as the one George W. Bush nearly lost because of dimpled chads-but as the one he clearly won because blacks were kept from voting. Blacks already have started to view it that way: In a Zogby poll, 53 percent of whites who voted for Gore said they would view a Bush presidency as legitimate, but 60 percent of black Gore voters said they wouldn't. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson once said, then racism is the last refuge of a Democrat-and it's how liberals will attempt to interpret this election for years to come.

Civil-rights leaders are already taking up the cudgels. "There is a pattern of intentional racial profiling of voting while black. It's sinister," said Jesse Jackson on December 3. "African-American voters were targeted to be disenfranchised."

In fact, there's precious little truth to these charges. If there was any attempt to disenfranchise blacks, it was a conspicuous failure. Although black turnout nationwide remained flat compared with 1996, it was up dramatically in a few places-including Florida, where it rose by as much as 65 percent. This should hardly come as a shock to the NAACP, which spent at least $1 million in the state. Democrat Bill Nelson probably owes his Senate victory to new black voters. If blacks had voted at rates similar to those of four years ago, Gore himself would have no grounds for challenging the results in Florida: Bush would have beaten him handily.

Put any election under a microscope, and problems are bound to emerge: registered voters whose names don't show up on the rolls, the disqualification of absentee ballots, last-minute precinct changes causing confusion, and even parking problems. All of these charges, and more, have been made in Florida. One speaker at the NAACP's Miami hearing said a ballot box was not picked up from his church. Some Haitian voters apparently weren't given bilingual ballots (although, it must be said, the ability to read English is a naturalization requirement). In Leon County, the police manned a "safety checkpoint" near a polling place (in what turned out to be a perfectly legal and innocuous operation).

Yet it's true that black ballots appear to have been invalidated at a high rate. One-third of the disqualified votes in south Florida were cast in predominately black areas, according to an analysis by Ft. Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel. In Duval and Miami-Dade counties, voters in precincts with a black population of greater than 70 percent were roughly three times more likely to have a ruined ballot as were those in precincts with a black population of less than 30 percent, according to a Washington Post study.

But recognizing this reality does not require a belief that blacks faced a systematic denial of their voting rights in Florida-or that anything at all untoward went on. In typical left-wing fashion, the Village Voice's Laura Conaway and James Ridgeway blamed Gore's defeat in Florida on "a centuries-old national system of labor, education, and politics designed to keep African Americans from rising above the legacy of chattel slavery." In the same article, however, they also identified a fundamental truth, one that few others have been brave enough to mention: "the botched ballots of the barely literate." This is a difficult thing for anybody to discuss for fear of being branded a hater. On December 6, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson condemned "patronizing, if not racist, Republican strategists [who] imply that black voters displayed a low IQ in the voting booth." The question, of course, isn't IQ; it's education-and the Village Voice is correct when it identifies literacy as a major reason so many ballots cast by blacks were disallowed. The reading scores of black 17-year-olds are comparable to those of white 13-year-olds. Is it any surprise then that some blacks have more difficulty making sense of ballots?

Rural Gadsden County-the only majority-black county in Florida-is a case in point. Two-thirds of its voters supported Gore, but it also had to throw out 12 percent of its ballots, more than any other county in the state. Its fourth-, eighth-, and tenth-graders ranked dead last in state reading scores. The Left simply refuses to acknowledge that these uncomfortable facts have consequences in the voting booth. In Duval County, Democratic representative Corrine Brown and Jesse Jackson have sued the canvassing board, citing those high ballot-spoilage rates.

Oddly enough, it's George W. Bush who's been talking about this problem-to the NAACP itself. Speaking at the NAACP convention in July, Bush said that reading is "the new civil right." He repeated these words in the second presidential debate and in campaign ads. The experience of Florida shows how they hit the mark. Blacks don't face literacy tests they way they did in Mississippi four decades ago, but they do face literacy tests insofar as they actually have to read and understand the ballots placed before them. These rules apply to everybody, of course. But until the literacy gap between blacks and whites narrows, there will also be a voting gap. Both of these gaps will close a lot sooner if the NAACP and liberal civil-rights leaders realize that racism is no longer the biggest hurdle for blacks in America, that Palm Beach is not Selma, and that today's civil-rights agenda would benefit from fresh thinking. The first step is to see what the problem really is.