Reply #61: It's the turnout numbers that I wonder about. Look here.

[pointsoflight]

Cuyahoga county--where Cleveland resides--was critical to this election. The Kerry campaign was counting on this county to carry Ohio, and had that happened, he would've won the majority of electoral votes. What happened in Coyahoga county? Many things have already been reported, but here's another that I haven't seen talked about....

Late into the night when Bush was leading in Ohio with 90% of precincts reporting, the democratic party was still optimistic of pulling out a win because they were still expecting huge numbers of additional votes from Cleveland that they thought would give them the lead. The votes never materialized. What happened?

55 precincts in Cleveland show a turnout of less than 40%. Several show a turnout of less than 20%, and one even shows a turnout of 7%. That's right, SEVEN PERCENT. Despite reports of very strong ground efforts, record turnouts, and long lines throughout Cleveland, 60, 70, 80, even 90+% of the people who took the time to register didn't bother to show up?!? Or did they? Was there massive voter suppression in these precincts? Were voters in these precincts forced to vote via provisional ballots, ballots that are not audited in Ohio, so that we have no way of knowing how many were cast?

We need to get a handle on this. In the 55 precincts I mention, 84.3% of the counted votes went to Kerry, 15.1% to Bush. We're talking about many thousands of votes here, just in Cleveland alone. It could be that we got a horrific turnout, far worse than our expectations. But it could also be that people showed up and there was massive voter suppression, a massive compaign to challenge voters in these precincts, and/or a massive compaign to force voters into using unaudited (and therefore easily "lost") provisional ballots because of challenges, machine malfunctions, etc. Whatever the case may be, we had a HUGE shortfall of votes from Cuyahoga County and Cleveland in particular--literally tens and tens of thousands less than expected--and we need to see if we can find out why.

Here's the raw data from Cuyahoga County for confirmation:

http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/boe/results/history/2004/1 ...