Staged Election: Several Republicans Win by Exact Same Amount of Votes

[TalkingDog]

This was taken from a ticker at Voxfux:
I don't know if anybody had hit upon that particular "pattern" before.

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/november2004/031104sameamount.htm

REPUBLICANS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY WIN OVER DEMOCRATS BY GAINING 18,181 VOTES.........TEXAS REPUBLICANS DANNY SCHEEL, CARTER CASTEEL and JEFF WENTWORTH ALL RECIEVED EXACTLY THE SAME NUMBER OF VOTES - 18,181............TIME TO WAKE UP........... THE CHANCES OF ALL THREE GETTING THE EXACT SAME NUMBER OF VOTES IS ON THE ORDER OF MILLIONS TO ONE - YET THE CORPORATE MEDIA REFUSES TO REPORT THIS FACT.......... BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE..............TURNS OUT THAT MICHIGAN REPUBLICAN CANDICE MILLER BEAT HER DEMOCRATIC OPPONENT - SHE GOT 18,181 VOTES.....HMMMMM.....AND REPUBLICAN MICHAEL SMIGIEL FROM MARYLAND BEAT HIS CHALLENGER - CAN YOU GUESS HOW MANY VOTES HE GOT? YOU GUESSED IT - 18,181........

[RunningFromCongress]

1. Send it to Keith

[Mandate My Ass]

2. That's the same number that came up

in some of the more surprising upsets in 2002.

[Cheswick2.0]

3. again? This happened before

and still the democratic party does nothing.

[MileHiStealth]

4. Someone needs to do a stastical analysis ....

With literally thousands of elections,
it's probable that you might get 4 or
5 that acquire the same amount of votes.
Might be interesting to see if this
deviates from the norm ....

[Zuni]

5. that sounds like a mandate for paper reciepts

[verdalaven]

6. 2002

I believe this is from the 2002 election.

[Eloriel]

11. Yes, Comal County, TX -- for the 3 first mentioned. I don't know

about the other 18,181 winners.

[jayctravis]

7. This should be Moore's new title:

Fahrenheit: 18181

[Nederland]

8. This is a lie

I've checked a few of these names and this article is an out right lie. I suggest you folks stop believing everything you read.


Carter Casteel won with 32,911 votes

http://www.co.comal.tx.us/Vote/General_Election2004.htm

Jeff Wentworth won with 136,802 votes

http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist.exe


I'll add more results as I find them...

Yup, one more lie:

Michael Smigiel won with 19,216 votes.

http://www.elections.state.md.us/past_elections/2002/results/g_summary.txt

God, this is too easy...

Yup, one more. Haven't found one example to be true...

Candice Miller: 137,339
Carl Marlinga: 77,053

http://miboecfr.nicusa.com/election/results/02GEN/02GENall.html

[geek tragedy]

9. You mean not everything on a Looney Tunes whackjob website

is true?

Oh lord, my head hurts!

[Eloriel]

12. Never mind

No Surrender took care of it very nicely. :D

[City Lights]

17. I try, Eloriel.

;-)

[City Lights]

10. This happened in 2002.

http://www.co.comal.tx.us/Election_Results2002.htm

State Senator, District 25

Jeff Wentworth (R)
18181

Joseph (Joe) P. Sullivan (D)
4988

Rex Black (L)
723

State Representative, District 73

Carter Casteel (R)
18181

Virgil Yanta (D)
5303

County Judge

Danny Scheel (R)
18181

Lois M. Duggan (D)
5547

[Nederland]

13. Different Pages

Someone needs to find out why these two don't match:

http://www.co.comal.tx.us/Election_Results2002.htm

http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist.exe

(choose 2002 General from the dropdown)


I suspect that your page simply has a cut and paste error in it, but I know that won't fly with people here.

[geek tragedy]

14. This is one county's results.

The big scandal here is that the Republican candidates for state senate and house got the same number of votes.

Not exactly surprising, but a bit unusual--more of a quirk.

[Nederland]

15. Never mind

I know the difference. One is statewide results, the other is county only. The original posts leads you to believe that the vote count was for the entire race, not just a single county.

[TalkingDog]

18. Ahhh....

Now Nederland. Tsk, tsk...where did you get the idea that believe everything I read?


Putting forth an argument does not necessarily mean one has to believe it. One may just be providing intruiguing information. For those who care to rebut, have at. Seeing the results, I think the system worked just fine.

I'm always happy to be corrected. That's how we learn. Well, that's how I learn anyway.

[Oreo]

16. More...

http://www.votewatch.us/forums/general/279448539584

Impossible
Posted by Unregistered User at 07-23-2003 12:22 AM

I know a bit about statistics, and I can say that considering the total number of voters involved, it is improbably for 2 winners to have the same votes, it is highly improbably for 2 republican winners to have the same votes, and it is for practical purposes impossible for 3 or more republican winners to have the same votes.

For 5 republican winners to have the same number of votes is insanely impossible. It's like someone winning a nationwide lottery 3 times in a row. It cannot happen.

But what totally floors me is not that it happened, but that it's gotton so little press coverage. I'm reaching for my tinfoil hat to say that MAYBE this could POSSIBLY be related to POTENTIAL right-wing control of the corporate US media, but of course that's just conspiracy nonsense.

So I'm left to spin my cognitive wheels straining to come up with some other explanation as to why the media doesn't think it's odd for 5 republicans to score wins with exactly the same number of votes, that number being an anagram, no less!

AND
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/book_reviews/3107blackbx_voting.html

November 2002, Comal County, Texas: A Texas-sized anomaly on ES&S machines was discovered when the uncanny coincidence came to light that three winning Republican candidates in a row tallied exactly 18,181 votes. It was called weird but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to audit.

[Nederland]

19. On the contrary

Its far more likely that Republicans would share the same vote totals than two winning candidates.

Think of this way. Put ten people in a room and you ask them what party they belong too. Let's say 7 of them say they are Democrats and 3 say they are Republicans. You then ask them to write down their votes for President, Governor, and Senate. How likely is it that the votes will be split 7/3 for every category? Pretty high, huh?

Granted, the odds fall as the number of voters get higher, but it illustrates the error being made by the link in the original post. You can't calculate the odds of this happening by assuming that votes are not randomly distributed. There is an extremely high correlation between votes for one Republican candidate and votes for another Republican candidate. Its not a random distribution.