Redstate

By Gerry Daly Posted in User Blogs — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Christopher Hitchens can write. He turns a phrase beautifully, and his passion is evident. He has a few flaws as a writer, however. You don't want him writing about someone shortly after his or her death, as he has this knack of deciding that is a perfectly swell time to really tear into the subject (for examples, see Bob Hope and Pope John Paul II). And apparently, he's not very good at checking the facts and history behind conspiracy theories.

Hitchens, in an article titled "Ohio's Odd Numbers" originally published in Vanity Fair, writes,

First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general--and probable--one nationwide and statewide.)

In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. So maybe we have a barn-burning, charismatic future candidate on our hands, and Ms. Connally is a force to be reckoned with on a national scale. Or is it perhaps a trick of the Ohio atmosphere?

Maybe Ms. Connally is such a force, although the election results cast that supposition into serious doubt. Her opponent, Thomas J. Moyer, won by 6.4% statewide. In fact, in 4 counties Moyer tallied more raw votes than George W. Bush did. Part of the reason for this is that, for the Supreme Court in Ohio, the ballots do not show party affiliation, and the candidates are not listed on the same line as the rest of a party's slate of candidates. The elections are supposedly non-partisan.

However, if Hitchens finds it suspicious when a Supreme Court candidate significantly outperforms a Presidential candidate, then he really should be blown away by the 1996 Ohio election. That year, there was not just one, but two Supreme Court races. Both candidates who the Republican Party supported, Andrew Douglas and Evelyn Stratton, handily won. Mr. Douglas outperformed Bob Dole by 370,718 votes. Ms. Stratton did by 156,381. Mr. Douglas got more votes than Mr. Dole in 81 of 88 counties (92%).

Hitchens then moves on to a particular ward and third-party candidates:

In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. In addition to this eminence, they also possess distinctive (but not particularly African-American-sounding) names. In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

I will have to stipulate to Mr. Hitchens' data for that one particular precinct; Ohio does not report down to the individual precincts. First, there is the logical fallacy; if I was going to commit vote fraud, for example, I certainly would do so in as efficient a manner as possible and would create votes for my candidate rather than for a third-party candidate. Second is the fact that, between them statewide, Badnarik and Peroutka totaled just over 25,000 votes-- not nearly enough to swing the election. As for what happened in precinct 4F, I haven't a clue. Perhaps another precinct was folded into it from 2000-- this happened in several places throughout Ohio where precincts had been combined with the expectation that new Diebold machines would be used; when the state decided to not use them over concerns raised about the reliability of the machines, it was too late to divide the precincts back up.

What I do know, however, is that in 2000, the Libertarian candidate took 0.24% of the Cuyahoga vote compared to 0.28% in 2004. And while the Constitution party tripled its score in Cuyahoga from 0.09% to 0.26%, one has to remember that in 2000, Howard Phillips was competing for votes with Pat Buchanan (who had taken 0.53% of the vote). In 2004, Bush and Kerry combined for 99.4% of the Cuyahoga vote. In 2000, Bush, Gore and Nader combined for 99.0%.

Next:

In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.

Perhaps I am missing something here, but there was a glitch that was caught and corrected before the vote totals were certified. The problem here is what, exactly?

Next:

In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein-type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

In actuality, turnout levels this high for individual precincts are not unprecedented, particularly when a party has invested resources into a get-out-the-vote effort. For example, in Spokane, Washington, the turnout was over 90% in at least 10 different precincts, according to the Spokesman-Review. As for the 'late reported' votes, I cannot speak to the reasons they were reported the way they were reported; perhaps they were absentee ballots or provisional ballots or some combination thereof, or perhaps there was simply an error in the 'precincts reported' numbers early on. What I can tell, however, is that the 51,760 votes recorded in the certified results represent a 120% increase in votes from 2000 in Miami County; statewide, the increase in Ohio's votes was 119%. If one were to subtract 19,000 votes from Miami's 2004 total, then the vote total for the county would have been just 76.4% of what the 2000 turnout was. Now that would have been suspicious!

Next:

In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of "vote hopping," which is to say that voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another. Some specialists in election software diagnose this as a "calibration issue."

The same Washington Post article quotes Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for Mahoning County, as saying "It happens every election... It's something we have to live with and we can fix." In 2000, Al Gore took 63.1% of the two-party vote in Mahoning County. In 2004, John Kerry took 63% of the two-party vote in Mahoning, so it appears Mr. McCabe is on to something.

By the end of the article, Hitchens is stretching for evidence so far as to suggest that when a particular county gave Kerry the same level of support it did for Gore in 2000, it is suspicious:

Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the G.O.P. would have felt the need to engage in any voter "suppression." A point for the anti- conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact-same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.

Spending dollars does not necessarily lead to more votes, as George W. Bush's efforts in California in 2000 demonstrate. However, given that, nationwide, Bush got 50.73% of the popular vote in 2004 compared to 47.87% in 2000 (nearly a 3% gain), him increasing his vote percentage in a Republican county by less than 2% does not strike me as particularly noteworthy. Your mileage may vary.

In actuality, Bush increased his percentage of the vote in 76 of Ohio's 88 counties. Ohio was closer in 2004 than in 2000 in large part because, of the 12 counties where he did not, 4 were among the 5 largest counties, representing over a third of the state's total.

Hitchens then goes on to a favorite bugaboo, Diebold:

Diebold, which manufactures paper-free, touch-screen voting machines, likewise has its corporate headquarters in Ohio. Its chairman, president, and C.E.O., Walden O'Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (See "Hack the Vote," by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, April 2004.) Diebold, together with its competitor, E.S.&S., counts more than half the votes cast in the United States. This not very acute competition is perhaps made still less acute by the fact that a vice president of E.S.&S. and a Diebold director of strategic services are brothers.

Unfortunately for this angle, the newer Diebold machines were not used in Ohio for the 2004 election. The vast majority of counties used punch cards, with 13 using optical scan and just 7 using some sort of touchscreen-- including Franklin, which was the county where George W. Bush did the worst compared to 2000, and happens to be the second biggest county in Ohio.

[This article was originally published on my blog, DalyThoughts. ]