Cuyahoga County Precincts - Revised! (Update at 4:53 PM Tuesday)

Apparently, that mysterious web page over at ivillage has now changed. I wish I understood why the total number of votes reported from some precincts is greater than the number of registered voters. But apparently the nice people over at the Cuyahoga County elections office have explained this to the author's satisfaction.

I must admit, I'm totally stumped. :shrug:

Here is their explanation. You can see it for yourself if you go back to that web page.

I thought the problem was not more votes than voters at the polls that day, but more votes than registered voters (which should include anyone able to vote absentee)

.....I'm still confused.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

If some people want to talk about voting irregularities, that's totally cool. If people also want to talk about why we can't win rural counties, that's also cool. It's a big community.

Sorry, I still don't see how there can be more votes than people registered in any district.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

To stop yourself being aggravated about what we're doing here, don't read these kinds of threads. There are plenty of others about changing the Democratic party. You'll feel better in those, I think. ;)

I would expect a troll to sound. Coming in here with no cred telling us to question why we support the queers. Give me a fucking break.

Please tell?


(Sniffing and Poking)

Nobody ever uses the term special interest group when referring to his own party. EVER.

Just a hint. You'll get better.

But UNFORTUNATELY the DLC/NDOL has used that term to signify parts of the party's base THEY don't included -- unions, feminists (one would assume pro-Choicers in that), and minority activist groups. It's just one reason I've been so anti-DLC.

But you're right on one level:

Nobody ever uses the term special interest group when referring to his own party.

I don't consider them part of my party either. :evilgrin:

:grr:

Some weird stuff!

Different equation to get the repeated numbers you had?

I think it was in 2000, not totally sure. Might have been 1998. Three different Republicans in that county won their elections (whatever they were) by exactly that margin of victory.

Never, to my knowledge, explained.

isnt that a ha ha again? suspicious that this keeps turning up.

Skinner, I spoke with county officials yesterday and it was explained that absentee ballots fell within broader Congressional districts rather than specific voting precincts. The absentees were dispersed (it looks like evenly) across the voting precincts within the report, skewing the voter turnout percentages. That's why the media is not covering the story that looks obvious to everyone else.

It's an odd way of doing things and the county is not doing a good job of explaining it.

for absentees. Anybody have quick access to that?

Why have precincts total the same number of votes? The exact same number. They surely didn't have the exact same subtotals, so the absentees they say are distributed to each of them are not likely to be even, either. It's.... odd. At the very least.

Where is the Congressional District register of absentees?

Still not buying this.

Quite tricky and confusing. Tallying and reporting tangible ballots could only be made tricky an confusing on purpose.

"Absentee ballots are added into several districts for unoffical counts, but do not go toward the county total more than once. It is quite tricky and confusing, but it makes sense now after talking with the county (they were quite nice)."
==================================================================
As to the first sentence, why would ABs be added into "several districts"? And even if they -are-, wouldn't that skew the result?
When they are all added up, how would whatever's doing the "addition" know -whether- or -how many- of the sub-totals are "dupes"?

And just how the hell is counting votes "tricky and confusing"? Why should it be any more complex than counting watermelons? This whole thing is so far beyond bizarre, we need a new adjective.
:grr:

I'm just an accountant and, forgive me for saying, this sounds like a bunch of double talk and/or ineptitude on the part of Cuyahoga county.

What they seem to be saying is that the municipalities and the county were counting the absentee ballots differently. If that's the case, why would they do that?

Are there no rules that determine how the votes are reported? Is this not public information? If so, don't we want it reported clearly so as to ascertain who won? No? Oh, my mistake.


I feel better now.

they also have electronic voting machines (touchscreens and/or optical scanners).

I don't buy it either. OR, I'd have to see much better, more "auditable" numbers and information before I could.

It makes no sense whatsoever. My BS detector is going crazy!

This is not how it's done, folks.

COUNTY Barbara Anne Ferris Edward Fitzpatrick Herman *Dennis J. Kucinich
Non-Partisan Republican Democratic
Cuyahoga ** 17,753 94,120 167,221
Percentage of Votes 6.36% 33.72% 59.92
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/results/11-02-04.htm

Next we have to find the towns in his district since it is only a part of Cuyahoga Co

Here you go: http://www.house.gov/kucinich/info/District.htm

absentee are registered voters... that is a phony explanation. There were still 93,000 more votes than REGISTERED VOTERS (which include absentee!)

Thanks.

also, absentee or not, it doesn't matter what double talk they use to explain it.

What matters is that the numbers REPORTED TO THE CENTRAL ELECTION DATABASE WERE WRONG.

Or maybe I am just too dumb to grasp a complicated issue like this, and crazy :crazy:

...and caused some of us hours of wasted time poring over the Cuyahoga BOE canvass report?

:argh:

;) (No real offense intended toward the web site author--There might be other fraud going on that we'll never know about, without someone taking a risk and bringing strange accounting like this to attention. It's ultimately the BOE's fault for calculating their figures in such an inexplicable way).

Why does he now say that the explanation makes SENSE?

It doesn't.

If there are 30 votes for Bush in County A

and 30 votes for Bush in County B

and 30 votes for Bush in County C

and 10 absentee ballots for Bush

that's 100 votes.

If you add 10 absentee ballots for Bush to all three counties, A B and C, now he has 120 votes.

How does it NOT skew the results if you're adding the absentee ballots to multiple counties?

Honestly, help me understand

Ohio is adding a number to each of counties A, B, and C to come out with a designated, like number. Since, as you showed in your example, their 'actual' total is 120, they are deliberately adding 10 to each county. If A had 40, B had 30, and C had 25 in another county, they would add different numbers to each in order to also reach 120. The county totals were irrelevant, the total is what they were after.

They wanted 120, so they made it happen. Only on a much grader scale. In Cuyahoga County, itself, this was done by ward and then the variable number was added to the municipality's total to reach the desired target.

Sound correct?

Very well put. The final result is still the same - reporting an incorrect number of votes.

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 ...

So they added AND subtracted. Very clever.

Cleveland 6C, 7.1% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 45-1
Cleveland 13D, 13.05% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 207-42
Cleveland 13F, 19.6% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 156-4
Cleveland 13O, 21.01% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 44-5
Cleveland 6B, 21.8% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 82-4
Cleveland 10L, 24.72% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 207-7
Cleveland 6D, 28.43% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 127-5
Cleveland 5C, 28.97% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 195-29
Cleveland 7V, 29.25% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 249-33

and the list goes on and on...

Are they serious? :eyes: So, these folks waited 3-10 hours in the cold rain because there was NO line?

pointsoflight, you do good work! :toast: Glad to meet ya! :hi:

about how long people waited to vote in Cleveland Precint 6C?

But with the lines reported in Ohio, having only 46 people voting in one spot in Cleveland is highly unlikely, to say the least. That works out to, what, less than five voters per hour? In a typical local electon, maybe, but in this election? No way. Both sides were too fired up for that to be the result, especially in a major city.

If you need more info. on the actual turnout in Cleveland 6C, I'd suggest posting the question in the Ohio forum. Folks there might know. Might even have been one of (at least) the 46 voters. ;)

Welcome to DU, bigmust! :hi:

John Conyers?

The Kerry campaign?

Keith Olbermann?

Bev Harris? (I'd sure like to see those voter rolls from those precincts, wouldn't you? Call up a few of them and ask how come they showed up and hardly anyone else did, what problems -- -- if any -- they encountered?)

Stunning, just stunning. GREAT work, too.

You can find submission info in this thread (under Activism and Media - Olbermann):

VOTE FRAUD Links - a DU Compendium
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=201&topic_id=1984#

Tell me, who wrote it?

We need the total number of provisional votes cast from those under-voted precincts, even if they're not eventually counted.

Perhaps there is a simple explanation for this. Please review and let me know if you have any ideas...

Out of curiosity, I totalled up all the posted totals for each listed here for both registrations and cast ballots: http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm

The totals for the county came out to a whopping 1,488,672 registered voters in Cuyahoga and 1,248,189 votes cast. I made sure to remove all the subprecints and quadruple checked it to ensure I wasn't counting anything twice and the math is right. The county reported 665,000 total votes cast? I am not sure what it means but I think it is important to review this data. I have searched many blogs and have not found anyone else that has discovered this discrepency so I thought it important to share.

I have links to both the HTML and Xcel versions.

LINKS
http://kramerico.com/ohio.htm
http://kramerico.com/ohio.xls

These numbers are just totally whacked on so many different levels !!

But having kids in the education system here in Ohio, I understand. They teach math a little differently here than the rest of the world. That is except for maybe Florida.

Kerry math: 2+2=1
Bush math: 2+2=8

89,000 LESS votes for congress than president? Almost 14%?
Even stranger, the turnout in Franklin Co.(Columbus) was LOWER than in 2000!!! I guess those 3 hour lines must not have been "reality based".

If so, and someone didn't want to take the time (after spending 3-10 hours in line) to vote in every race, they could have cast their ballot in favor of John Kerry simply by selecting the straight Dem choice. But they didn't. Not if that many people failed to vote in the congressional races. Which I doubt.

This makes less sense every time new data is found. Which certainly casts suspicion on the system, doesn't it?

Edit: What did the congressional races look like in those districts? Which party won and by how much? Was it undesirable to the people adding votes to the system to give more to those congressional races, too?

The majority of the congressional votes would be in DK's district, or Tubbs-Jones' district. Heavy Dem districts. If you brought their numbers up, you would bring Kerry's up. NO DOUBT.

Plus the ludicrous, official numbers on turnout in each precinct (or ward?) in Cleveland. Only forty-six voters in one place? Line? What line?!

Do they think we're blind? Geez.

I waited for at least an hour in 2004. There was absolutely no lines in 2000.

My friends say the same thing. For turnout to be lower in '04 than '00, an awful lot of votes "musta got lost".

Are they seriously saying the turnout was less than in 2000?

According to Blackwell, 61.3% in 2000. 60.95 in 2004. I don't believe it.

lines in 2000 and long lines in 2004?
:nuke:

If the numbers in Franklin and Cuyahoga even REMOTELY matched what happened on the ground there, Kerry wins Ohio. Plus, figure out who led the last minute cavalry charge of the "Digital Christians" in the puke districts and Kerry wins by 5 points. Just like the exit polls.

This might be slightly off topic, but is enough being made on the issue of how long the lines were is some of these Ohio and Florida precincts?

8-10 hours to vote? Are you kidding me? I know very few people who wanted this scumbag out of office more than me, but I don't think I would have waited in an 8 hour line to vote. In this age of instant gratification, how many people left the lines or more significantly just drove away? Weren't we hoping to have a huge 18-24 hour turnout to vote against our war-mongering president? Do you know any 18-24 year olds who have waited over 8 hours to do anything?

I have seen annectdotal evidence that there were more machines in republican areas. If the lines were significantly longer in 'Democratic' precincts, don't we have a voting rights issue?

If there was a reduction in voting machines (and there are stories that this was the case), then it should be verifiable, shouldn't it? What would be the rationale for doing it other than to suppress the vote? This should be raised along with all the other stuff.

When I was doing the single parent thing, I couldn't have afforded 8 hours off on a Tuesday, no way.

freepers or nubies

I've noticed that most of the newbies have provided very helpful information and/or support. Some keep pounding on the 'Prove it to me' meme which is time-consuming, at best, so... I'm not going into those threads, anymore. ;)

To everyone new here in this thread: Welcome to DU! :hi:

...but started posting for the first time yesterday. I've been dying to post the data I've been finding since Nov 2, but new registrations weren't being accepted until yesterday.

I pretty well go by the content of people's posts. You brought up some great points. Thanks.

because the registration option was not available until today. And I am so glad about that. I've been lurking since November 2nd. If it wasn't for DU, I think I woulda offed myself.

I do believe there are a few freepers here now. And it's pissing me off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuckers!

Don't post much, lurked since summer. 14% of Cuyahoga not voting for congress doesn't seem possible. I'm in Stark, and our gap was only around 2%. I've talked to friends in Columbus, who are stunned that the turnout was "low". The totals in both counties reek of turning away thousands and thousands. Bad as, if not worse than padding numbers.

precincts, make some phone calls and stuff. The Kerry campaign (and the Ohio Dem Party) ought to have voter rolls. Heck, even Democracy For American might have voter rolls.

We MUST find out what caused the low turnout.

There were huge lines, huge. There was no lines in 2000.

I'm not discounting long lines. I live in CO, no idea what went on in OH. But long lines might also be attributed to new technology.

They may have had paper or punch ballots or 1950's-era lever machines in 2000. What's that cost, some privacy curtains? Very cheap to provide 5 or 10 or even 20 voting booths. I imagine computers are more expensive, and so there may also have been many less booths.

Less booths = more lines.
Classist to the core.

Bring me the red pen! ;)


edited for softening of content

:hi:

I think a lot of people (like me) who were interested in the election, etc. would check out this site but not post, but given the magnitude of what is happening, feel compelled to throw in their two cents. There are probably a lot of freepers as well (usually give themselves away by posting some contrary comments that really don't add anything other than to piss people off or demoralize them).

There just aren't enough absentee ballots in Cuyahoga County to account for the differences in numbers in the results.

This explains how, for the absentee ballots to make up the difference in the totals, the turnout among the registered voters in those oddball cities needs to be 98% or greater (otherwise, the "extra" ballots exceed the number of absentee ballots that Cuyahoga county reports):

XML spreadsheet breaks down the data

Same, only as an Excel spreadsheet

So in the Woodmere precinct, how did 1587% of registered voters cast ballots?! That is just such an enormous discrepency. Even if there were some provisionals, even if there were some absentee - something unbelievable happened. I am a little lost and kind of flying by the seat of my pants with all this information. I still cant match this up. Is that something worth looking at?

...Cuyahoga County just split up the absentee ballots in each congressional district willy-nilly among its cities. Why, to confuse people? Who knows?

But the fact remains that, unless 98% or more of the registered voters in those listed Cuyahoga cities actually showed up to vote on Tuesday (which we know isn't true), the overvote reported is higher than the 80,000-odd absentee ballots in the county. Not so easy to explain that one, I suspect.

I downloaded the canvas report and am going through it ward by ward and precinct by precint. That as well as other wards jumped out at me. Yes in Woodmere village there are only 558 registered voters and in checking the canvas report you'll find the 301 people voted, 258Kerry and 40 for Bush. The other 8296 votes are a set of the absentee votes which I easily found in the canvas report.
However, some of the rest of the absetee ballots are not reconciling as easily with the total votes cast 665334 and seperately the 80624absentee ballots.
Ultimately, I may start inputing all the individual precinct data to see if I get the 433,262Kerry and 215,624Bush.
Sorry to say precinct by precinct totals are adding up correctly, in a way I'm glad but I pretty determined to figure out where the fuck Bush got 8.5 million votes over the last election and why the fuck the exit polls were so bad in just a handful of states, swing states none the less.

Well, hopefully, those 17,000 lawyers are going through those vote totals precinct by precinct because the truth is buried in those numbers.

but surely the problem is more glaring than you suggest? You have assumed that ALL the 80,624 absentee ballots were scattered randomly through just those communities were "turnout" exceeded 100%. But surely that can't be the case and in fact even a 100% "turnout" in those communities won't explain it. 77,000 absentee ballots went "randomly" to these communities and just 3,600 to the rest of the County. I don't buy it.

Is for someone to get all the data from every precinct in an .xls file. There are plenty of people out there who can run the data through all sorts of data analysis and tell if there are trends which appear to be odd mathematically(i.e. winning by the same amount of votes among other things). Anyone know how to do these analyses efficiently?

Alex
Impeachment by the People

I've made an excel sheet for the data but I need to put it somewhere where I don't have to pay the Bandwidth fees for eveyone and their mother downloading it. Anyone?

Lucypher

Send it to me at alex@ibtp.org. I will post it for free and then advertise it on DU for anyone else. Obviously will keep your name as the credits, just providing the hosting.

Alex Hamilton
Impeachment by the People

I thought it would end up being a lot larger -- so I just stuck it on my website.

Thanks!

What's your website?

Alex
Impeachment by the People

particular precincts regardless of where the absentee votes were cast. thus, they concentrated those votes in particular precincts even tho the voters were registered elsewhere in the county. a stupid practice; but, nonetheless, the explanation makes sense.

votes cast, and had precinct by precinct votes cast and included absentee ballots as its own precinct.

http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm

and for the most part, they are adding up. But I did find anomolies in Strongville ward3, 12108 votes recorded when only 4953 appear on the canvas report and Solon ward6, 4300 votes when only 1488 are on the canvas report. The Salon votes appear to be added in as absentee but I still haven't reconciled the Stronsville extra votes.

I have found it difficult to reconcile the precint totals to match 665334 votes cast and seperately the 80624 absentee votes. The closest I have gotten is 588225 votes from the wards plus 77586 absentee which equals 665811 votes cast. The senate, house, reps all easily reconcile but adding up the wards has been a pain in ass. I was able to cut and paste alot of the data from the summary pages and have checked many of the precints by hand. But nothing stands out but the inability to reconcile the votes cast keeps me looking for those stand out wards where alot of "extra" votes may have gotten dumped. Hopefully, one of those 17,000 lawyers is taking a hard look at each and every canvas report because buried in those numbers is the truth.

That is THE problem. We want the numbers before they've been played with. Kerry, imo, lacks the balls to force a contestation this time around. This is about preparing the US for 2008.

on my website PLEASE BE KIND ie DON'T DOWNLOAD IT UNLESS YOU GOING TO USE IT.


The canvasing data comes from the sites listed -- I pulled out the presidential votes only and I totaled up brook parks results and related them to the html web page results.

txt canvasing data is on sheet 2 of the spreadsheet
html data is on sheet one.

BE KIND!!!

http://www.barsmart.com/voteresults.cfm

Go to this page:
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm#Ballots

and look at the total number of ballots cast it says:

BALLOTS CAST TOTAL        665,334 
BALLOTS CAST ABSENTEE      80,624

But if you add up all of the numbers in the ballots cast column you
end up with 4,422,303.

On the same page look at the registered voter counts:

REGISTERED VOTERS TOTAL 1,005,807 	  	 

If you just round up and quickly add up the first five rows the value is already above the registered total, adding up all the rows you get 6,382,676.

I just don't get it?

Now on to the canvassing data.

Data source:
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/history/2004/EL52.TXT

Look at sheet 2 -- this is the canvassing data:
http://www.barsmart.com/voteresults.cfm

This data closely matches their "totals" I spent about an hour reformatting it so I could pull it into a spread sheet. What I did with the EL52.TXT was to tear out only the presidential ballots cast figures, imported int Excel, and then totaled the ballots cast totals/canidates, they equal 652,381, which is much closer to 665,334 then 6 million odd votes.

Anyone want to help me figure this out?

and not for the first time, but aren't the absentee ballots given ten days from election day to arrive? It was my impression that they were not going to start counting until then. Is it Nov 12 already? Did I oversleep? How can they know the ballot totals if the deadline has not arrived?

I thought Blackwell said that they won't start counting Absentee ballots until Nov 13?

"This is a very deliberate and cautious process," he told CNN. "And so, you know, I tell everybody just take a deep breath and relax. We can't predict what the results are going to be. We can only guarantee you you're going to get an honest and fair count through our bipartisan system."

the contested ballots from people who voted at the wrong place, might be felons, etc. Absentees are counted as they come in.

with 8,854 ballots cast, which is 1586% voter turnout.

Those working the Woodmere Vil precinct polls, expecting to accomodate 558 voters must have been quite surprised to see the 1500% plus turnout. Would explain the 4-5 hour lines at polling places.

Did anyone here vote at Woodmere Vil precinct?

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x975769

Nightwing posted an article from the Cleveland plain dealer saying we have it wrong about the precent totals.

The Akron Beacon-Journal this morning wrote a piece investigating the irregularities in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland).

Here's the link:

<http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/10143328.htm>

The net-net: all of the absentee ballots for the congressional candidates were added equally to all of the precincts in that district, rather than apportioned out by district.

Yes, they made a mistake, and yes, it should have been caught earlier, but it is the only significant irregularity in the data, which is widely available for anyone to peruse.

I'm not a freeper, just a very, very sad Ohioan.

Now the Florida results, on the other hand.....

because when you examine the posted returns, and sum-up all of the "overages" (ballots exceeding the number of registered voters in a precinct) - you will find that the total overages (97,489) EXCEED the total number of absentee ballots (80,624). No matter how you distibute 80,624 absentee ballots into the various precincts, it is mathematically impossible to "create" 97,489 over-votes on the tallies.

BTW, it seems that the raw canvassing data has been removed from the Cuyohoga BOE website - kinda fishy, wouldn't you say? Go ahead, follow this link and click on the "Nov 2 canvassing report" (hint: Error: The page cannot be found)!!!

http://www.cuyahoga.oh.us/BOE/results/canvas.htm

Wouldn't you still need to check an absentee against the registration - especially to make sure someone didn't vote twice. If you went to the trouble to check registration, why not just count the absentee in the precinct in which they were registered? In fact, wouldn't you have to do this to avoid any double-votes?

There are two different reports here -- the canvass report -- in which the numbers match those reported to the state and networks -- and the summary report on the BOE website.
When they created the summary report, which is not the official count but is provided for voter convenience, they added the total absentee ballot count for the congressional district to each ward total -- why, I don't know -- but it doesn't affect the official results. I am a little mad, because I spent a long time trying to work this stuff out.
We should move off of Cuyahoga county -- the numbers -- except for the undercount (another kettle of fish) -- are very good for Kerry here -- he did well even in the affluent areas. Let's try to look at Warren County, where the really fishy stuff is going on.

because when you examine their posted returns, and sum-up all of the "over-votes" (ballots exceeding the number of registered voters in a precinct) - you will find that the total overages (97,489) EXCEED the total number of absentee ballots (80,624). No matter how you distibute 80,624 absentee ballots into the various precincts, it is mathematically impossible to "create" 97,489 "over-votes" on the tallies.

BTW, it seems that the raw canvassing data has been removed from the Cuyohoga BOE website - kinda fishy, wouldn't you say? Go ahead, follow this link and click on the "Nov 2 canvassing report" (hint: Error: The page cannot be found)!!!

http://www.cuyahoga.oh.us/BOE/results/canvas.htm

When they issued the summary, they added all of the absentee ballots in the CD to every ward in the CD -- resulting in duplicate counts -- that is why if you add up the wards and then compare to the city total, you come up with the same numbers. I have the canvass results on a spreadsheet if you are interested -- I think the main thing is here there is no way to make the summary numbers in the report we are looking at add up the the officially reported totals -- but you can do that with the canvass

I've been trying to make sense of my local precinct (in Shaker Heights - visited by Michael Moore on election day) for the past week.

Absentee ballots are clearly key, and impossible to sort out on any level below that of the county.

I would feel better about the confusion if Sondra Robinson, the Cuyahoga BOE official responsible for absentee ballots, hadn't resigned without explanation on Oct 24.

http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=25330

Certainly the excuse that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director, Michael Vu, used, "It’s an overwhelming year where we’ve seen overwhelming numbers of applicant who wanted an absentee ballot..." doesn't seem credible: according to BOE figures 80624 absentee ballots were cast this year, and 70,813 in 2000. A 14% increase hardly seems "overwhelming."

Perhaps something more serious took place with the absentee ballots??

And how could we tell?

This HAS to break by December 13th. If Bush gets sworn in, it's all over. Even if he gets caught rigging the election and is responsible for doing it, the president is the man who took the oath of office according to the law.

Yes, that is very scary.

Sorry if I'm being dense (and yes, I'm a newbie) - but it sounds like there are two things going on in Cuyahoga. First, on election day, while over a million and a half people were registered to vote, there were only about 665,000 votes registered (with precincts registering as low as 7% turnout). Then, the BOE messed up in posting data online (at least from what they said - that the correct data was buried in another report), and the totals worked out to more than the total number of votes. Basically right?

I'm curious about this low voter turnout. Has THIS been satisfactorily explained? There must be images out there from one of these polling stations - local news coverage?

traditionally the percentage of actual voters to registered voters is HORRIBLY lower in large urban areas, like Cuyahoga County. You can register voters up the wazoo, but only a minority of them will vote even in hotly-contested elections.

But the data not only shows a low turnout of registered voters in some Cuyahoga precincts, but also a big drop-off from the 2000 numbers, despite the intensified ground effort and the reports of long lines.

im sorry but either absentee ballots are counted at the precinct they belong to or seperate at the county level.
there is no way a precinct should ever have more votes than voters.

this explaination is just impossible to believe.

sure they will PLAY with the numbers until they fix it. right....