Excuse me, but I don't trust that votes in Ohio weren't flipped inside machines

[Impious]

I'm not believing this mere 50%-48% advantage. NFW.

I think 52-46% sounds a lot more like the REAL number, but that anything more than a 1-2% flip would have been too obvious.

PROVE that I'm wrong.

[AnnaLee]

1. Must be that arithmetic thingy again. nm.

[MadBadger]

2. Arent there still 200,000 provisionals or so?

Would probably pad the lead

[LisaL]

3. Most of them are probably in Cuyahoga county. So, yes, should only pad the lead.

[Firebirds01]

4. Here is what you do

Get the 2008 totals by county for Ohio (NYT had this yesterday but they deleted the page today. boooh).

Compare them to the current totals. This may be hard because, like you said, the machines may have skimmed just a few votes here and there. Obama won in 2008 by 22 votes per precinct. How hard would it be to switched a couple dozen and just chalk it up to voters changing their minds in 2012.


We may never know.

[UCmeNdc]

5. Agree!

There is in no way, a verifiable way to recount the vote. There should be. This election might have been too obvious to cheat and flip votes. What about in the future when voters are not so focused on the out come. It is time to fix these voting machines. No reason for that not to be a priority.

[nobunnyclue]

6. Don't count out the Republicans ran a hard ground game in Ohio too...

... there were, it seemed to me at least, WAY more white male 20-30s at the polls where I voted this year.

The Republicans tend to focus nearly exclusively on grey heads when it comes to GOTV - hitting up the senior centers and stuff like that. This year I think they went outside their comfort zone a bit trying to mobilize the young, white, blue-collar Christians likely to be in economic dire straights with foreclosures and unemployment, maybe even with union affiliations. However, while I was surprised how relatively well they did with women - given some of the crap they came out with on social issues - I think they miscalculated their margin with the 20-40 "working class" vote here, thinking more people would buy their b.s. about the auto industry.

Had Romney not been a private equity guy, whose buddies everyone knew were waiting in the wings to pick Chystler & GM's bones, he just might have been able to get out a bigger Republican blue-collar vote, but I do think the margin of victory shows they made some conscious headway in that direction...