Reply #296: whoops, if I had seen yours first...

[OnTheOtherHand]

It's not that I misread the numbers. The footnote specifically cites page 5 of the DNC report. So I went to page 5, found a similar factoid with completely different content, and assumed that he had misread it.

I still think that's possible, because this is sort of a strange way of reporting the provisional ballot result. But there's a good chance that he wrote the statement with the intention of finding the page number later, and then he or someone else just got the reference wrong. If the citations are web-only, maybe they can just fix it online.

The provisional ballot statistic doesn't exactly support RFK's claim, because (1) the sample is limited to Cuyahoga County, and (2) not all new registrants who cast provisional ballots would be people who were "not listed on the rolls." A bunch would be people who hadn't yet submitted ID (or went to the wrong polling place). I'm also troubled because this percentage doesn't seem to jibe at all with the proportion of new registrants statewide who reported ballot problems (p. 23) -- just about 2% -- but it's possible that new registrants who were handed a provisional ballot didn't think of that as a "registration challenge" (discussion of awareness on p. 33). Basically, I doubt that the claim is true, but it might be close.

The one more thing I would really like to know, although it doesn't affect the truth value of the claim, is what percentage of new registrants' ballots were counted. Overall, about 2/3 of Cuya provisional ballots were counted (the survey estimates seem to imply that about 3/5 of the uncounted provisionals were Kerry votes*). If one quarter of new registrants showed up, didn't find their names on the rolls, cast provisional ballots, and most of them had them counted (with a distinct but modest skew against Kerry), then if this is the "single most astounding fact" from the election... umm, whatever. (It is worth keeping in mind that -- at least according to the figures I have -- there were finally about 35,000 uncounted provisional ballots in Ohio, new registrants and otherwise. If those split about 60:40 for Kerry, then they net him about 7,000 votes.)

I hope to learn more from the folks who ran the surveys.

* Table 2 on p. 31: Kerry voters and Bush voters cast provisional ballots at almost identical rates. Table 5 on p. 32: 69% of Kerry voter provisionals and 79% of Bush voter provisionals are counted. So, overall, uncounted Kerry provisionals appear to outnumber uncounted Bush provisionals about 3-to-2, based on this Cuya sample.