I’m not sure what to make of all these numbers, but over at ustogether.org, they’ve been doing some analysis of the voting results in Florida during this election. What they’ve found is that, in the smaller counties, where votes were cast on optical scan code machines, there is a discrepancy — often enormous — between the party affiliations of voter and the tallies of votes cast for each candidate.
Take Lafayette County, for example. The state’s breakdown of voter registration by county shows that as of October, 2004, there were 4,309 registered voters in the county. Of those voters, 570 were Republicans and 3,570 were Democrats, with the remaining 169 voters distributed among 2 dozen other affiliations, including “No Party.” That works out to 83% donkeys to 13% elephants.The state’s official tally of votes shows that 3,325 votes were cast in Lafayette County on Tuesday, for a turnout of 77%.
According to the national exit polls, 89% of people registered as Democrats voted for John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. Based on that figure, you would expect that Kerry would garner 2452 votes in Lafayette county: 83% (registered Democrats ) * 3325 (votes) * 89% (vote on party line). By the same calculations, Bush should have received about 392 votes. In actuality, Bush got 2460 votes and Kerry only received 845! In other words, 73% of the registered Democrats in Lafayette County voted for George W. Bush. I guess its possible, but… is it likely?
Rob Dixon at Rant World has been doing a close analysis of the Florida data, as has Goldstein at Enemy of the People. They’ve both pointed out, as has Dwight Meredith from Wampum in the comments on Goldstein’s entry, that party affiliation may not be a reliable predictor of voting preferences, since many Southeren voters may have maintained their party affiliations since the days when the South was solid for the Dems. (I have no evidence about that, but the South has been solid Republican for quite a while; the Republican’s Southern Strategy has been in operation at least since the days of Nixon. Would people have kept their affiliation with a party they disagreed with and voted against for nearly 30 years?)
Meanwhile, there’s some other funny numbers being reported by Audrey Mantey at Ideamouth. Seems that according to the Florida Department of State Division of Elections, as of the “First Set of Unofficial Returns”, more votes were counted in a number of counties than turnout would indicate. Palm Beach County, for example, reported a turnout of 452,061, and yet they also broke it down into votes by party, where the total came to 542,835. Then, the Palm Beach County Election Results page, shows a turnout of 404,666 on Election Day, with a total turnout of 547,340… Of course, this could be explained by the differences between early reports and final reports…
Finally, Thom Hartmann reports at Common Dreams:
“…When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida’s 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.”
Potentially very explosive, if true. And Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico are still counting…
