Reply #115: Another Discovery

[minvis]

As I've been putting the Clermont info. into Excel, I came across an interesting thing about the ballot order and its precincts. When I put the precincts in numerical order, according to their BOE's own system, I noticed that the first precinct (Loveland City A) had the ballot order Badnarik, Bush, Kerry, Nader, Peroutka and the second precinct (Loveland City B) had the order Bush, Kerry, Nader, Peroutka, Badnarik and so on for the rest of the precincts. In other words, from Precinct 1 to Precinct 191, the ballot orders went as follows: 1,2,3,4,5; 2,3,4,5,1; 3,4,5,1,2; 4,5,1,2,3; 5,1,2,3,4 etc.

Now, of course, the precincts that shared polling locations did not follow the numerical precinct order. They jumped around a bit, but that got me to thinking. If I know what the ballot order is going to be in each precinct and I know that many precincts need to share polling locations, I can possibly group the precincts that benefit my candidate the most, while making the third-party votes not appear too large. The best configuration would be one where the ballot crawls either 1 position or 4 positions. This makes a Kerry vote made in the wrong precinct either a Bush vote or a 'Disqualified' vote.

Guess how many precincts had the crawl position of 1 or 4 in Clermont County? 133 out of 175.