Reply #12: let me say about the ACTUAL undervote rate

[OnTheOtherHand]

Super, informative post, but may I elaborate on a few points?

I've never tried to figure "normal" House undervote rates, because they could vary a lot depending on the context -- but I think that Vinod Thomas (on the pages that you linked to) carefully and correctly made the case that the undervote rate of a bit over 4% in the NC-08 portion of Mecklenburg County was high for an off-year race. A "normal" figure would be closer to 2%. I can go along with your "normal, more or less" in the context of a comparison with FL-13 -- the Meck figures don't scream disaster in the way that the Sarasota figures do. But I do think there were excess undervotes, perhaps 300 or so in the NC-08 race.

One possible reason that I haven't seen mentioned has to do with the ballot layout. In Meck, the House races appeared at the bottom of the first column, which was headed, "FOR STRAIGHT PARTY VOTING." So, voters who did not intend to vote a straight-party ticket may have skipped to the second column. If they weren't consciously looking for the House race(s), some may never have seen it.

There's one other respect in which I have to defend the Scoop article -- even though its factual premise isn't actually factual, so ultimately one can't say much good about it. It doesn't actually say that NC-08 was a Kissell stronghold; it refers to "Kissell's stronghold in Mecklenburg." Given that Kissell did win the Meck portion of NC-08 by better than 2 to 1, I can't object to that. The problem is that the article wildly overstates the number of undervotes.