Friday, December 01, 2006

Vote Additions in Franklin, A Question for the Experts

Checking the now-available official numbers of votes by precinct in Franklin County against the unofficial totals released the day after the election, and the number of outstanding provisionals that were listed during the interim, one finds that adding all of the provisionals to the unofficial count still falls short of the official vote count in 30 precincts (click to view data). This means that votes materialized from sources unknown in the interim (BTW, absentees are listed as absentees, not by precinct).

There were supposedly 30 voting machines that had unreported votes on election night due to "improper shutdown." This number does not seem like a coincidence, and it would make sense that those unaccounted votes could explain these totals. The problem arises from the fact that several of these precincts are only showing one extra vote, which means in these 6 cases, the number of uncounted votes on election night was exactly one greater than the number of rejected provisionals. So far, no problem, but, if the election night uncounted votes were to exactly equal the number of rejected provisionals, there would be no 'extra' votes in this analysis, it would just look like all the provisionals had been accepted. I find it hard to believe that the shutdown error and the rejected provisional count were off by one vote in one direction in six precincts, but never matched or differed by one in the other direction in any of the precincts.

If all of the above is true and makes sense, then there were more than 30 machines with problems on election night, and I would kind of like to know how many. But my first question is, Can you tell me which of my assumptions is wrong or doesn't make sense?

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