Reply #82: Strong Kerry Counties Missing 3.89% to Strong Bush 2.08%

[ignatzmouse]

I appreciate your input, but I believe the assumption that e-voting counties would cast missing ballots at the same rate for each candidate is wrong. The most suggestive evidence to the contrary are the counties that went strongest for either candidate. The seven counties that went strongest for Kerry had a cumulative missing rate of 3.89%. Contrast that to the seven counties that went strongest for Bush -- the missing rate was just 2.08%. If I subtract the absentees (which have a paper trail and might be counted differently) the rate increases to 4.86% in the strong Kerry counties and 2.57% in the strong Bush counties, a difference of 2.29%! It makes a strong argument that there were simply diminishing Kerry votes to miscast.

With that in mind, the split counties in the middle are unknown as some amount of play in the actual votes may have made a close county that favored Kerry now favor Bush because of missing votes. Still, there was a distinction between the counties that favored Kerry against the counties that favored Bush: 2.47% missing in the Kerry counties, 2.24% missing in the Bush counties.

There is also the curious case of Lea County who had the strongest Bush vote in the state at 79% against just 20% for Kerry. And yet Lea returned a missing vote percentage of just 0.74%, similar to op-scan counties. It's odd to say the least. They are listed as having 100 Danaher Shouptronic machines and 2 Optical scanners -- quite typical as op-scan devices seem to be used to count absentees. Unless they switched out for all op-scans at their precincts at the last moment, we have something of a problem here. Either it's telling us that the e-voting machines in Lea are somehow all good whereas the ones in the rest of the state are really shoddy or it's telling us that something about the high percentage of Bush votes didn't trigger blank and miscast ballots...