Updates on that ‘blue wave’question for 2018 midterms

Is a ‘Blue wave’ really coming?

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Again, from those helpful people at TargetSmart, sent around initially by Politico “Morning Score”–below are the ten highest vote totals, reported or estimated, of early voters and absentee voters, by state. A few changes to the list since last week, aside from more votes. Texas, modeled GOP, moved up from 5th to 1st in early/absentee voting. Colorado, modeled GOP slightly, moved up into the top-ten turnout in 9th place. Arizona, modeled GOP, moved up from 8th to 6th in vote totals so far.

  1. Texas – modeled GOP    (2,380,937)
  2. Florida – modeled GOP   (2,013,970)
  3. California – modeled Dem      (1,512,058)
  4. Georgia – modeled GOP         (1,053,445)
  5. North Carolina – modeled Dem     (1,049,521)
  6. Arizona – modeled GOP         (824,130)
  7. Tennessee – modeled heavily GOP     (805,652)
  8. Michigan – modeled GOP       (574,807)
  9. Colorado – modeled GOP, barely       (548,754)
  10. Ohio – modeled GOP  (535,373)

Net effects: California, modeled Democratic, moves down to 3rd; and Illinois, modeled Democratic, slides to eleventh. The other net effect: of the ten states with the most early and/or absentee voters, eight are modeled GOP by this Democratic political data-services firm.

North Carolina remains the only plus sign for the Democratic Party in this top-ten list both in modeling and in high early/absentee vote. Illinois – modeled heavily Dem  (479,867) – unsurprisingly – also shows solid turnout/returns, though less so than Tennessee among others.

Below the top ten states, Iowa is still good news for Democrats – modeled Dem (282,661). So is Virginia, but again with lower early voting at 160,822.

The two biggest states in the top ten, Texas and Florida, still look GOP, if the modeling is accurate. It should be pointed out, however, that the early vote totals on the website differ seriously from the count provided by the Texas Board of Elections. [My mistake: inserted total for registered voters.]

Michigan and Ohio voting still look Republican. (Michigan does not have early voting, so its high total means that an awful lot of people are taking steps to vote absentee.) So do Wisconsin – modeled GOP (219,580), and Pennsylvania – modeled GOP (93,485). If North Carolina has high early/absentee voting and Democratic modeling, Pennsylvania has correspondingly low returns, so far, and Republican modeling. (Pennsylvania does not have early voting but has absentee voting.)

Someone who really wants to crystal-ball-gaze with numbers might check out the data on how many of these early/absentee voters are indicated as Caucasian and as senior citizens, by the way.

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Is there a ‘Blue wave’?

Is a ‘Blue wave’ really coming?

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I’m not so sure. Or to put it better, I cannot see it from here, in the blue state of Maryland.

I’ll come back to the question next week. For now, here are some numbers on early voting, from TargetSmart, sent via Politico’s “Morning Score” emessage.

Early voting so far has been hefty but not out-of-sight (unlike the $$$ donations). (More on those next week.) Here are the top ten states, by vote totals reported or estimated of early voters and absentee voters so far:

  1. Florida – modeled GOP   (1,168,600)             [now 1,448,251]
  2. California – modeled Dem      (786,096)
  3. Georgia – modeled GOP         (742,017)
  4. North Carolina – modeled Dem     (709,603)
  5. Texas – modeled GOP            (678,680)         [now 1,187,007]
  6. Tennessee – modeled heavily GOP     (521,918)
  7. Michigan – modeled GOP       (428,692)
  8. Arizona – modeled GOP         (370,137)
  9. Ohio – modeled GOP  (369,526)
  10. Illinois – modeled heavily Dem  (246,006)

Of the ten states with the most early and absentee voters, seven are modeled GOP by this Democratic political data-services firm.

The only plus sign for the Democratic Party in this top-ten list both in modeling and in high early/absentee vote, so far, is North Carolina. (California and Illinois are both modeled deep-blue, but as usual; not much surprise there.)

Just below the top ten states, the next good news for Democrats is Iowa – modeled Dem (220,635). Minnesota early voters are also projected at more Democratic than GOP (185,215). Virginia is also modeled Dem, but with lower early voting at 124,752.

The two biggest states in the top ten, Texas and Florida, appear to be going GOP, if the trend lines continue. Meanwhile, the fact that Michigan and Ohio voting appears Republican-majority at this point calls into serious question any ‘blue wave’, let alone a blue tsunami.

Same point re Wisconsin – modeled GOP (119,168) [now 200,626], and for Pennsylvania – modeled GOP (56,004). If North Carolina is a bright spot for Democrats with high early/absentee voting and Democratic modeling, Pennsylvania looks correspondingly worse, with low voting and Republican modeling.

Obviously, early voting is still going on; the early and absentee ballots are not all in yet. Some updates can be found quickly, vide the State of Texas website.

Then there’s Election Day to come.

Predictions are vain, and there is no crystal ball. But some of the thuggish blue-wave triumphalism I’ve glimpsed looks premature, to say the least.

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Another mass shooting at a school

February 14, 2018. Valentine’s Day ruined for the rest of their lives for a number of families in Parkland, Florida.

At the scene

The exact number of high school kids killed by this mass shooter remains to be disclosed. The names, the smiling faces in school photos and family videos, have yet to be released.

Authorities reportedly say that there have been fourteen victims. The shooter is in a nearby hospital, taken into police custody and then loaded onto a stretcher.

This is the eighteenth school shooting in 2018.

UPDATE February 16:

The number of dead has been verified. Seventeen people were killed by the shooter, Nikolas Cruz. Cruz turned out to be a disturbed former student expelled from Douglas High last year. The murdered include fourteen students–kids whose parents sent them to school that morning who never came home–aged fourteen to eighteen. The other three are teachers. Assistant football coach Aaron Feis put his life on the line, and lost it, running to help and shielding students with his own person.

Once again millions of people in the U.S. are wondering why we are not allowed to have even the most minimal regulation of weapons of deadly force. Speaking of ‘self-defense’, why did this disturbed kid have the key to where his weapon was locked up? A better question–why did this disturbed kid have such a weapon in the first place?

In plain English, a semi-automatic AR-15 is not ‘self-defense’. Allowing a distressed individual who obsesses over weapons to acquire a cache of weapons is not ‘self-defense’.

(I dealt with this argument briefly in one section of my book, Firearms Regulation in the Bill of Rights: Eighteenth-Century English Language and the U.S. Constitution.)

As ever when innocent people are killed by yet another gratuitous and unnecessary act of violence, many are again raising

Inevitably, though, the push-back against any improvement, any improvement in public safety at all, has already begun. And some of it comes from our news media. Today’s Washington Post splashily rejects Everytown USA’s statistic that there have been eighteen school shootings in 2018. I cited the stat myself, above. WaPo is caviling. Everytown counts any and every firing of a gun at or in a school. The gist of the WaPo article seems to be that anything short of bullets penetrating flesh in a school should not be characterized as a school shooting.

This is fact-checking? A gun at or in a school brings its lethal potential.  One could as fairly mention that the count of eighteen excludes all the school shootings that get forestalled.

We had an example Tuesday. As has been widely reported, a grandmother in Washington state prevented another shooting–or massacre–from happening. It’s wonderful news, an act worthy of public gratitude, and just plain a good idea all around. But neither this nor any other incident of guns and weapons commandeered before they hurt anyone, in a school, makes it into the “eighteen” tally.

 

 

In honor of Sunday morning, a prediction about Sunday morning

In honor of Sunday morning, a prediction about Sunday morning

It’s Sunday morning, and we can expect that today’s morning talk shows will not be terse about the much-touted close and/or ‘tightening’ election. Close election is the moral indifferents’ ground game. It was their calling card; now it is their mantra. If it happens, it will be a defeat for the public.

Hence this article:

It is a given that pre-game armchair quarterbacking is going to be weaker than post-game ditto. But with due respect to some of the established journalists who get on air while people like me never do,* I still cannot  understand the excessive chatter about a 2012 ‘close election’. If a close election is such a given, why do they talk about it so unceasingly? –They don’t keep reminding us that we have two major parties, one Democratic, you know, and the other Republican.

Sigmund Freud

Professor Sigmund Freud and I hypothesize that in fact the hysterical insisters on a ‘close election’ fear that it might be, or might have been, otherwise. As Gertrude said, Methinks somebody doth protest too much.

(Freudian slip: When you say one thing but mean your mother.)

Summary analysis, so far as I can figure it out:

Some Washington insiders (as Chris Matthews called them, without irony) are making common cause with the Republican noise machine, up to a point.

A close election is a GOP win

They’re doing so not because they have a committed belief that rich-get-richer is the best fiscal policy, not because they have any fantasy that Mitt Romney will produce ‘jobs’, and not because they want all abortions, etc., illegal; quite the contrary. They are simply afraid on grounds of short-term self-interest to call an issue for the guy who’s winning it. Like other established but under-qualified persons, they’re not eager to see merit rewarded. It’s the gut response, when you don’t have guts.

Thus, while no one in his right mind could think that a Romney-Ryan administration would be other than economic disaster, we still have serious news people treating the GOP ticket as though it embodied gravitas. The same people insist on a close election.

Electoral map, 2008

As to the election, predictions are vain, of course. But we do have ‘facts on the ground’, a phrase deferred to ad nauseam in lip service, less in accuracy. Among tangibles, we have a popular incumbent president. Incumbency in every other national election in memory has been considered a fundamental by the national political press. The guys on the bus accorded incumbency fundamental status even with the troubled administration of George W. Bush. (They unceasingly touted GWBush’s ‘likability’, too.) In 2012, the incumbent is being challenged by a discredited party–the Republicans continue to lose in party identification. At the top of the ticket, the minority party has a lackluster candidate who has never been a powerful national figure. Romney’s unfavorables, for people who track that kind of thing, are near-record. The candidate has proven himself so willing to say anything, depending on audience, that virtually every adult citizen knows about the propensity. His defining visual, the Etch-a-Sketch quality, is a staple for late-night comics. Again, in any other election years the guys on the bus would have made a big deal of this kind of thing. (On the other hand, Romney’s flip-flopping has become such a given that it’s in danger of becoming passively accepted, and thus acceptable.)

Then there’s Romney’s vice presidential pick. The fact that Paul Ryan is still running for Congress suggests that he doesn’t see the upcoming election as a win for Romney.

 

Ryan gets pans for washing clean pots

Clearly, what should be reported most about the election is what it means for the country. A Romney win would be disaster, given the foreign-policy recklessness and domestic reverse-Robin-Hood the candidate has upheld during the campaign. Thus most political reporting is a loss from the get-go.

Even in narrowly political terms, however, the trend of much political reporting recently has been disturbing. Recent signs of the times have gone unstated or understated. Early voting is up in 2012–up even over the strong early vote of2008–and analysis of early voting consistently gives the advantage to Obama and the Democrats over Romney and the GOP. Swing state polls continue to give Obama the edge. Gaffes and missteps continue for the Romney-Ryan campaign. Opinion polls on the second debate give Obama the win, rightly. One poll is linked here; the consensus is advantage-Obama, from immediately post-debate to the present. Vice President Joe Biden is universally considered to have won in his appearance with Paul Ryan. Numbers from number man Nate Silver continue to give Obama the lead, as they have for months. A short article from Silver on occasions when Gallup has been the outlier is linked here. Virtually every electoral college map gives the win to Obama, and has for months, even while published opinion polls continue to undercount some demographics including cell-phone users. Even the published polls indicate that Obama sweeps the youth vote.

Yet with all the plus factors touched on here, and more, the Obama campaign itself has started doing what the John Kerry campaign did in 2004–focusing too much on a few swing states. This is a tactic too politically transparent and too liable to breed cynicism. It brings a danger that people will forget that the president governs, watching him campaign. There is a margin of diminishing returns. Look how it worked for Kerry.**

It’s great for the president to visit Florida, which needs all the help it can get. But the president should also come to Baltimore (and to Prince George’s County, Md.), go to Richmond, to New Mexico, and to North Carolina, time permitting. Also, Obama’s team is undervaluing the incumbent. Let him spend more time governing: New Orleans also needs all the help it can get. So does Arizona. So does New Jersey, for that matter. Look at N.J.’s governor. So do all the states and localities where vote suppression tactics are taking hold.

 

Lining up to vote early

Obviously I do not belong to the brigade of highly paid experts with a track record of winning (or losing) national campaigns. My views are offered here simply as those of a voter, a writer and journalist, and an observer. I am offering them not to fill up air time but because I think I’m right. Viz.: People in the rest of the U.S. don’t appreciate being ignored because a few less than truthful pundits are again pretending to consider ‘undecided voters’ seriously. The rest of the country doesn’t appreciate being ignored while up-and-down voters keep wobbling with every opinion poll. For that matter, it doesn’t make a handful of states feel all that special to be wired like paramecia under a microscope, within days of a national election. The nation is more important than they are, as on some level they themselves know.

Bainport, Illinois

Let the ground game take up some of the slack on the campaign trail. Admittedly, some who perceive themselves as strategists could perceive limiting swing-state visits as a disadvantage. GOP opponent Mitt Romney, after all, doesn’t have to spend his time and energy governing. He could visit Florida another twelve times. But that’s because Romney hasn’t been elected to anything lately. Let Fox News have its polls, let the same crew of Washington insiders who boosted the Iraq war boost ‘centrists’, a ‘close election’, and ‘undecided voters’. These are not people to be influenced by. After all, if we actually have a close election in this country, the press will have failed the public.

To sum up, the administration has a good record, and should run on it. One of the uglier examples of the big lie in election 2012 has been Romney’s pretense that the Obama record is one to run away from. The GOP, in contrast, has an execrable record. Any good television ad campaign could condense the mortgage-derivatives crisis in a few spots. We’ve got upside-down mortgages because we had an upside-down Wall Street. Financial insiders touted disastrous products for the public and got out with billions themselves, everybody else paid the price, and Romney-Ryan and the congressional GOP have banded together to protect the privileged. Their slogan: Prevent improvement.

 

*I have not tried to get on television.

**Qualifier: Kerry won Ohio in 2004. He thus won the electoral college vote; most of the same media figures touting a close election this time swept Ohio under the rug in 2004.

2012 self funding and the state of Florida

More on self funding in 2012

 

Rick Scott

Self financing, once again, has not lighted up on the big board as one of the top political stories in 2012, and not merely because it is overshadowed by Mitt Romney’s refusal to disclose his tax returns. While there are some expensively self-financed mayor’s races, including in California–where, incidentally, more cities may soon declare bankruptcy than in any other state–the self-financing bug has simply not bitten in most big races.

 

Meg Whitman

Of the eleven governor’s races in 2012, only one involves major self financing. The gubernatorial primary in Missouri takes place Aug. 7, and so far, it looks as though the self-funding effort by David (Dave) Spence (R) is paying off. Spence has contributed more than $2 million to his gubernatorial effort and is competing for the GOP nomination against two candidates whose combined financial support does not equal his. The nominee will challenge incumbent Gov. Jay Nixon (D). Nobody claims that the copious self financing will make Spence a shoo-in for governor if he becomes the nominee. Spence was not projected to be the strongest potential nominee to begin with, and has gotten into trouble by  seeming to over-enhance his academic credentials in his resume. Calling a degree in Home Ec an economics degree may not be a crime but does have potential for generating effective television ads, and humor, about his candidacy.

 

Dave Spence, Missouri

Self financing in governor’s races in 2012 is dwarfed, of course, by the gargantuan tries for governor in 2010. Spence’s effort in Missouri comes to (so far) about one sixty-fourth the total contributed by Meg Whitman to her unsuccessful run against Jerry Brown in California. It comes to about one thirty-second the self financing by Rick Scott (R) in Florida, who won, contravening the predictions.

For further perspective, Spence’s self funding comes to about one eighteenth the amount donated to herself by Linda McMahon (R) in her unsuccessful senate race against Richard Blumenthal (D) in Connecticut.

Linda McMahon is back in the self-funding news again, running again for senator from Connecticut in 2012. Again, she is one of the top self funders according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It remains to be seen whether the self financing contributes more to a win, or to fuel more misogyny in politics.

A more noteworthy item is that the state of Florida is back in the self funding picture again in 2012. It’s not like Rick Scott’s run in 2010, not being written up much nationally, but Florida’s lengthy redistricting process, now theoretically complete, held up normal fundraising efforts for months. That doesn’t mean the money hasn’t come in. It just means that candidate money has been at least as important as usual in Florida, especially in the Florida state senate. Candidate self-financing looks to have kept some state senate campaigns going.

Another melancholy reflection of the use of redistricting delaying tactics, for the state GOP. I’ve seen the same thing in my home state of Texas. First the state party apparatus pushes through a redistricting plan that any attorney can see will not pass constitutional muster. (In Florida, by the way, the GOP is not the majority party by voter registration. It has a lock on the state government acquired through tactics, not through the ballot.) Then the state government, acting as a tool of the party apparatus, stonewalls, foot-drags and otherwise obstructs correction. Generally it pours more citizen money down the drain arguing the losing proposition in court. Then, once the courts have had their say and the state is mandated by law to fix the redistricting at least somewhat, it does exactly the minimum necessary to enable it to hold an election in November. Typically it blames the delay on the opposition–especially if the Dems file suit–and on ‘activist judges’ if not on judicial ‘tyranny’. (Money pays for the ad campaigns, remember.) Meanwhile, issuing ballots–including ballots mailed to overseas voters and to voters in the military–has been held up. The process determining placement of candidates’ names on the ballot has also been held up. And, of course, as long as the district lines are in flux/jeopardy, candidates’ ability to campaign effectively, or to raise funds, has also been held up.

This process of obstruction has disproportionate effect on money-strapped candidates or on comparatively disadvantaged candidates. Campaign fundraising is necessary for almost all people running for office. It is already dicier for challengers, for the minority party in the state legislature, for lesser known candidates and for candidates from poorer neighborhoods. Factor in undefined district boundaries, and it becomes more difficult.

A predominant note sounded after the 2010 elections was that, where candidate self funding is concerned, money cannot buy elections. True as far as it goes–see above, and the previous post–but money can, and does, have disproportionate impact gumming up the works for everyone else. It is at least as effective in buying the influence, behind the scenes, that obtains squirrelly redistricting proposals as in its more public form of campaign finance–where ironically it can call attention to a candidate’s shortcomings, or negatives, by highlighting them in the white-hot glare of big-bucks publicity.

Update August 10:

Sure enough, self funder Dave Spence won the Aug. 7 GOP gubernatorial primary in Missouri. Neither purely establishment GOPer nor pure tea-party outsider, Spence’s victory is something of an exception to the over-all pattern for self-financed candidates.

Florida primary, 2012

Florida primary 2012, yesterday and today

In other news, Florida held its 2012 Republican primary Tuesday. Newt Romney defeated Mitt Gingrich, 46 percent to 32 percent.

For perspective on the hullabaloo over the GOP primary, Republicans constitute 36 percent of registered voters in Florida. Total Florida voters: 11,053,664. Democrats: 4,604,373. Republicans: 3,962,406.

 

Florida law suppresses vote

The former fact was mentioned on MSNBC, not live-voice but in a banner on screen. John King on CNN soon afterward said that the primary was open to “more than four million Republican voters” in Florida.

 

Turnout was 1,663,698 as of recent numbers linked above, or 42 percent of registered GOPers. Down from the 2008 primary, as noted elsewhere, including at TPM, but better than the gubernatorial primary of 2010.

 

Probably commentators will rush en masse to blame the lower (than 2008) turnout on Romney’s “carpet bombing” ad campaign.

History shows primary turnout low for Florida, of course, as in other states generally, so it would be a mistake to read too much into it. Nonetheless, two sizable factors each reduce turnout in a GOP primary in Florida. Only one has been much discussed on air.

  • So many of the in-the-minority-and-they-know-it Obama haters are so content to have any GOP candidate, any at all, that they are content to stay on the sidelines in the primary. Generally they’d rather just know as little about their nominee as possible. They don’t want to be informed of any good reason they have to vote against him.
  • With a foreclosure rate among the highest in the nation, the economy dwarfs every other concern. Even the large media outlets cited exit polls showing economic concerns outweighing social issues, religion, hate-Obama-ism (dignified as ‘electability’), etc., in the Florida primary.

 

And it’s on to the Nevada caucuses.

 

The unfolding primary season is providing a useful punch list of reforms and small election improvements needed, state by state.

 

  • Iowa needed more oversight for careful counting of the vote at its highly respected caucuses. In 2012, some watchful Ron Paul supporters happened to provide the assistance that would better be built into the process. Even though some of them raised the alarm at the time, Romney was still mistakenly declared (more or less) the winner in Iowa.
  • Florida began reporting early returns—broadcast on national television—before all of the state’s polls had closed. This is what the Baptists used to call backsliding.

 

Cable channels, after all, are careful to reassure viewers repeatedly that they will not announce exit polls results on how people voted until the polls have closed. That cable hosts and pundits MSNBC and CNN drop heavy hints of the outcome beforehand, and that the channels jump to announce projected results a few seconds after the much-built-up top of the hour, is beside the point. Clearly the networks understand that it is anti-democratic-process to start announcing results before all citizens have had a chance to vote. Florida earliest returns showed Romney running ahead almost 2-to-1, too. That could not have been heartening for other people voting after work, in the Panhandle.

 

Gingrich

Obviously the smaller corrections are dwarfed by larger problems. Since the moment of Obama’s election, the GOP nationwide has engaged in a campaign of vote suppression on a scale unprecedented since the era of legal segregation. But that issue needs fuller detail.

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 7: Florida

2004 election revisited, part 7: Florida further

Following up previous posts

Obama at SOTU

President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night demonstrated again the greater quality of this president over the loon rhetoric coming from our current GOP debates. The quality gap is huge, and growing larger.

Mitt Romney

As written before, the guys coming out of the GOP field are going to need all the help they can get at election time, and previous elections involve some warning signs. Forewarned is forearmed.

In the 2000 election, 25 Florida counties used the maligned punch-card ballots, 41 used op-scan, and one county used paper ballots counted manually. Seventeen counties switched to optical scanners for the 2004 election.

Florida

Counties that switched from punch-card to op-scan did not necessarily show the biggest swings to Bush, but there was a distinct difference—in Bush’s favor–between op-scan counties and other counties. The picture over-all:

  • Total registered voters in the 15 counties using touch-screens:  5,576,264
  • Total registered voters in the 52 counties using op-scan ballots:  4,725,026
  • Outcome in the touch-screen counties:  Kerry 1,983,210 to Bush 1,845,876
  • Outcome in the op-scan counties:  Bush 2,110,414 to Kerry 1,591,790

Statistics come from election results and from election researcher Kathy Dopp’s analysis of touch-screen machines versus optical-scan paper voting in 2004.

There were further differences between op-scan voting results and touch-screen results, Florida 2004:

  • 15 Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines. Only 3 of these counties showed a 100+ percent jump in Republican votes, and 3 others showed a 100+ percent jump in Democratic votes. Neither party jumped more than 120 percent.
  • 52 counties used op-scan ballots. Of these, 43 showed a triple-digit jump for Republicans, two for Democrats. One had a whopping 602 percent jump in votes for Repubs, one over 400 percent, and two over 300 percent. Another ten op-scan counties had an over 200 percent jump in votes for Repubs. Nothing equivalent for Dems.

Leaving the eye-blearing numbers aside, think about the larger context of the 2004 election. Was John Kerry two or three times less popular in Florida in 2004 than Al Gore in 2000? Was GWBush—after the escape of Osama bin Laden, the invasion of Iraq, the war profiteering, the tax cuts for the rich—two or three times more appealing?

Back to those voting machines

Only three counties using op-scan machines had larger jumps for Democrats than for Republicans. The percentages below are vote gains, 2000 to 2004:

 (Dem Senate candidate Betty Kastor won Flagler County over Mel Martinez.)

Only four counties using op-scan had balanced percentage jumps in party voting:

Note that where the jump in voting by party was balanced, the outcomes were also reasonably divided. No one party or candidate (Bush) won all the time.

Turnout always matters.

Ten Florida counties with biggest turnout by number, in 2004:

  • Miami-Dade:  772,743
  • Broward:  707,202
  • Palm Beach:  547,340
  • Hillsborough:  464,253
  • Pinellas:  457,426
  • Orange:  388,095
  • Duval:  379,257
  • Brevard:  265,764
  • Lee:  242,434
  • Volusia:  229,098

Of these, Brevard, Duval, Orange, and Volusia used op-scan voting.

Ten Florida counties with highest turnout by percentage of registered voters, in 2004:

  • Flagler:  81.9% –jump gap only 102 to 103, Bush won, but close
  • Sarasota:  81.6%
  • Jefferson:  80.7% –jump gap 171 to 61, Kerry won
  • Leon:  79.8% –jump gap 105 to 81, Kerry won
  • Lee:  79.5%
  • Nassau:  79.2%
  • St Johns:  79% –jump gap 100 to 84, Bush won
  • Sumter:  79%
  • Brevard:  78.6% –jump gap 101 to 89, Bush won
  • Gadsden:  78.5% –jump gap 207 to 66, Kerry won

Of these, Brevard, Flagler, Gadsden, Jefferson, Leon and St Johns used op-scan voting. Nobody flipped the elections in Gadsden or Jefferson and Leon counties.

Ten Florida counties with lowest turnout by percentage of registered voters:

  • Hendry 57.2%
  • Osceola 63.3%
  • DeSoto 64% –jump gap 146 to 44, Bush won
  • Okeechobee 65.7% –jump gap 126 to 47, Bush won
  • Union 66.7% –jump gap 263 to 23, Bush won
  • Broward 66.8%
  • Dixie 66.9% –jump gap 305 to 26, Bush won
  • Hamilton 67.1% –jump gap 244 to 37, Bush won
  • Putnam 68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
  • Highlands 69.6% –jump gap 77 to 44, Bush won

Of these, DeSoto, Dixie, Hamilton, Highlands, Okeechobee, Putnam and Union all used op-scan voting. Low turnout, discouraged voters, unappealing voting technology—Bush swept.

The pattern held in the ten counties with lowest voter turnout by number, in 2004. Numbers are local turnout as reported:

  • Liberty 3,051 –Bush won
  • Lafayette 3,352 –Bush won
  • Glades 4,204 –Bush won
  • Union 4,714 –Bush won
  • Hamilton 5,131 –Bush won
  • Franklin 5,973 –Bush won
  • Calhoun 6,006 –Bush won
  • Dixie 6,472 –Bush won
  • Gilchrist 7,047 –Bush won
  • Hardee 7,281 –Bush won

Of these, all used op-scanned paper ballots, and all went for Bush. We have a winner.  Were they Florida’s ten smallest counties? Not quite: A list of the state’s ten smallest counties would bump Hardee, Gilchrist, Dixie, and Union. Baker, Bradford, Gulf, Holmes, Jefferson, Madison, Taylor, Wakulla and Washington all had populations in the twenty-something thousand range. The smallest counties also all used op-scan ballots, so we have another winner: Of these, only Jefferson went for Kerry, and Madison was close.

On a brighter note, in all these counties but Hardee, about half the total population (2000 census) turned out to vote–not too shabby for the lowest numerical turnout in the state. It was a high-interest election.

The middle

Continuing the test of brain-strain, let’s look at some middling turnout. Since the highest turnout ran 82% and the lowest percentage about 57%, midpoint would be about 70%.

Ten Florida counties with mid-range turnout, 2004:

  • Charlotte:  70.4%
  • Glades:  70.5% –jump gap 134 to 37, Bush won
  • Hardee:  70% –jump gap 182 to 32, Bush won
  • Okaloosa:  70.5% –jump gap 95 to 61, Bush crushed
  • Calhoun:  71.9% –jump gap 381 to 30, Bush won
  • Highlands:  69.6% –jump gap 77 to 54, Bush won
  • Pasco:  72.1%
  • Santa Rosa:  69.9% –jump gap 97 to 54, Bush won
  • Putnam:  68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
  • Polk:  71.5% –jump gap 107 to 68, Bush won

Of these, all but Charlotte and Pasco counties used op-scan. Charlotte and Pasco had predictable results, in line with voter registration and with voter turnout, with some crossover (Dem for Charlotte, Repub for Pasco).

I wrote on this material at the time.

A similar analysis can be found here. The author further pursues similar anomalies in the rural areas of other southern states. The author sums up:

“I started this page when I first saw the breakdown by voting machine of the results in Florida. Since the way people vote shouldn’t depend on the machines they use, it seemed to signal cheating. A careful examination of the voting patterns in Florida in 2000 and in Louisiana in 2000, however, has led me to conclude that the difference was due to the lopsided use of the opscan machines in rural northern Florida counties where there is a preponderance of “Dixiecrats”. A statistical analysis of the data from the 1996 election also supports this conclusion. The remainder of this page contains my analysis and reasoning in detail.”

 

“An avowed Muslim . . . get him out of our government”

More lying in Republican circles in Florida, and some of it probably naive.

Woman in Rick Santorum’s audience just said the president is “an avowed Muslim.” Her question: “why isn’t anything being done to get him out of our government?”

N.b. the MSNBC caption missed/omitted the “our” part.

Pressing on

Santorum, a senator, did not correct her.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that other people in the audience clapped when she said it. Wonder how many of them actually believe it. That anyone could believe it is not a tribute to the press in our time.

YouTube catches the exchange here.

Also here.

This is backwoods politics at its worst. It is heartbreaking that rural Florida, and other places like it, have been left to the tender mercies of the hard right for thirty years now. This is the result.

Not that there haven’t been worse comments, like this one from a hard-liner in Florida calling openly for violence against the president. Fortunately other Jewish leaders swiftly condemned the remarks. If they had been Santorum types, maybe not.

The only bright spot in those remarks caught on video is that the lady referred to the U.S. government as “our government.”

It’s a wonder GOP leaders haven’t already jumped down her throat for that.

The 2004 election revisited, part 3

Election Integrity

Revisiting the 2004 election. Part 3.

Still working in the holiday season—a useful change of work from hearing about Gingrich/Santorum/et al. is to remember the problems in 2004. Whoever wins the GOP nomination this year will have to do some fancy stepping to win the White House. Re past tactics, forewarned is forearmed.

Title says it all

On March 31, 2005, a group of solidly credentialed faculty scholars and researchers released a comprehensive study of the discrepancy between exit polls, in the 2004 election, and the published vote results.

The researchers found no “statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally.” The irregularities in the presidential election thus posed “an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unblinking investigation.”

Election Integrity

The comprehensive investigation failed to take place, although some members of Congress including Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) pursued inquiries. Where did the information go? Not into print in major newspapers. Not onto the airwaves. Like the U.S. Constitution, it is accessible on the Internet.

The 27-page “Analysis of the 2004 Exit Poll Discrepancies” reinforces earlier studies along the same lines, with further detail on election 2004. Authors and endorsers include professors in statistics, numerical analysis, computer studies, finance and mathematics from the U. of Utah, U. Wisconsin, Cornell, U. Pennsylvania, U. Illinois, Southern Methodist University and Notre Dame among others.

The introduction notes numerous election problems, including

  • “voting machine shortages;
  • ballots counted and recounted in secret;
  • lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots;
  • touch-screen machines that registered ‘Bush’ when voters pressed ‘Kerry’;
  • precincts in which there were more votes recorded than registered voters;
  • precincts in which the reported participation rate was less than 10%;
  • high rates of ‘spoiled’ ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded;
  • a sworn affidavit by a Florida computer programmer who claims he was hired to develop a voting program with a ‘back door’ mechanism to undetectably alter vote tallies.”

Campaigning Florida-Feeney style, 2004

These authors are not political hacks, whatever that term means. They are not hired guns paid to spin election results. They are genuine experts with earned credentials in the fields of inquiry, not backgrounds in public relations. They show a scholarly and patriotic passion for the truth.

“Under such circumstances” as the problems in this election, the authors wrote,

“we must rely on indirect evidence–such as exit polls, or analysis of election result data–as a check of the overall integrity of the official election results. Without auditability or transparency in our election systems, the role of exit polls as a trigger for further scrutiny is of paramount importance.”

They conclude,

“If the discrepancies between exit poll and election results cannot be explained by random sampling error; the “Reluctant Bush Responder” hypothesis is inconsistent with the data; and other exit polling errors are insufficient to explain the large exit polling discrepancies, then the only remaining explanation – that the official vote count was corrupted – must be seriously considered.”

Regrettably, the polling company, Edison/Mitofsky, did not release all the raw data from the exit polling. Having published the exit polls–referred to in previous posts–the company went back later and changed the published exit polls to make them conform retroactively to published vote tallies. It also attempted to repudiate its own original exit polls.

The exit polls were dismissed with argument, not fact.  A typical argument was that Bush voters were more reluctant to be interviewed by pollsters than were Kerry voters.

The faculty scholars make short work of this claim. As they point out,

“The Senate and presidential races were both questions on a single exit poll survey. If Bush supporters were refusing to fill out this survey as hypothesized, the accuracy of the exit poll should have been just as poor in the Senate races as it was in the presidential race. The presidential and Senate poll results derive from exactly the same responders.”

However,

“In 32 states, Senate elections took place on the same ballot with the presidential race. The exit polls were more accurate for Senate races than for the presidential race, including states where a Republican senator eventually won (pages 19-24).”

[emphasis added]

As the researchers point out, even while exit polls across the nation were being debunked as unreliable by the White House and its partisans, the accuracy of those same exit polls for Senate races was not questioned. The conclusion: “There is no logic to account for non-responders or missed voters when discussing the difference in the accuracy of results for the Senate versus the presidential races in the same exit poll.”

Nationally,

“The many anecdotal reports of voting irregularities create a context in which the possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously. The hypothesis that the discrepancy between the exit polls and election results is due to errors in the official election tally remains a coherent theory.”

“In fact, the burden of proof should be to show that the election process is accurate and fair. The integrity of the American electoral system can and should be beyond reproach. Citizens in the world’s oldest and greatest democracy should be provided every assurance that the mechanisms they have put in place to count our votes are fair and accurate. The legitimacy of our elected leaders depends upon it.”

Then and now, the points are unassailable:

  • “Well-documented security vulnerabilities and accuracy issues have affected voting equipment” back to the 1960s.
  • “The recent and ongoing proliferation of sophisticated computerized vote recording and tallying equipment” has drastically enhanced capabilities for vote-tampering.
  • “That the lion’s share of this equipment is developed, provided, and serviced by partisan private corporations only amplifies these serious concerns.”
  • “The fact that, in the 2004 election, all voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party certainly warrants further inquiry.”

As previously written, close-outcome states needing attention after the 2004 election included Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa. Some of the work on these problem areas will be posted.

One example: researcher Richard Hayes Phillips did magnificent work on election problems in Toledo, Ohio.

What we need meanwhile, among other things, is for our so-called ‘backwaters’ not to be left to the tender mercies of the GOP, corporate-funded influence groups, anti-human quasi-religious organizations, and the DC political press. It is wrong to neglect small towns and rural areas.

Returning to that interesting analysis from a reader in North Carolina who compared the NC 2004 early turnout to 2000 early turnout–

In 2004, the SBOE recorded 705,462 early voters. In 2000, there had been 393,152 early voters–an increase of 312,310.

Furthermore, in 2000, early voters were 46% Democrat and 38% Republican. In 2004, early voters were 50.4% Democrat and 36% Republican. That’s a 6-point net gain in Democratic turnout.

The reader points out that one would expect John Kerry to gain “at least several percentage points over Al Gore’s showing four years ago. But when the votes were tallied, Kerry registered virtually no improvement on Gore’s vote in North Carolina (Kerry 43.6%, Gore 43.2%).”

The reader anticipates possible objections:

  • Crossover voting might be a factor. But nothing indicates that crossover voting was bigger in 2004 than in 2000.
  • Southerners might have voted more for Gore than for Kerry. But that does not explain why Democratic turnout increased significantly, while GOP turnout decreased.

All in all, it was reasonable to expect Kerry to perform better in North Carolina in 2004 than Gore did in 2000, even aside from the fact that John Edwards was on the ticket. Although Kerry could not have won the state, there’s still an issue.

Again–as he points out–if Kerry got 47% in North Carolina, he would have another 130,000 votes in his column. “It’s not enough to win the state’s 15 electoral votes, but a 4-point upward shift across the country is in line with the exit poll projection of a 51-48% popular vote lead for Kerry.”

Four points or less would have moved close states to Kerry, costing George W. Bush the election.