Reply #20: SURPRISING ABSENTEE RESULTS IN STORY COUNTY, IA! [View All]

[Bill Bored]

We need to investigate this further and probably start a new thread, but check this out:

Total Presidential Vote:
Bush=20819; Kerry=23296; Diff=(-2477)
Bush %=46.63; Kerry %=52.17
Kerry won the county.

Now look at the Absentee Vote:
Bush=5703; Kerry=9652; Diff=(-3949)
Bush %=36.81; Kerry %=62.30
Kerry won the Absentee vote by a landslide!

Now look at the Non-Absentee (Polling Place) votes:
Bush=15116; Kerry=13644; Diff=1472
Bush %=52.56; Kerry %=47.44 (2-party)
Kerry LOST Non-Absentee Voting!

Who cares?

Well, first of all, Kerry got almost 4,000 more votes than Bush on the Absentee Ballots in just this one county in IA, which accounted for his entire victory margin in the county and then some. But Bush won the Non-Absentee voting in the SAME county. In other words, the results of Absentee Voting and Polling Place Voting in the SAME county were REVERSED!

And why should we care about that?

Well, keep in mind that Bush only won the state of IA by about 10,000 votes, so a difference of 4,000 absentee votes in just one county could be very significant.

So here's the question:

Why did Kerry win the absentee vote by a landslide and lose at the polls in the same county?

The county uses Diebold Op Scans so the Absentee Ballots should be the same type as the Polling Place ones i.e., paper ballots generated by GEMS. So why the difference in the absentee and polling place outcomes?

For one thing, GEMS considers Absentee Votes and Polling Place Votes to be separate Voter Groups. So they could have been defined with different parameters in the software.

Also, Straight Party voting (SP) accounted for 42% of Absentee Voting but only 17% of Polling Place Voting. So a deliberate or accidental mis-configuration of the straight party options, or the instructions to voters on how to vote Straight Party could account for the discrepancy.

Look at these SP voting totals:

Straight Party Absentee:
Repub=2260; Dem=3645; Diff=(-1385)
Assuming the usual party loyalties of ~90%, Kerry wins Absentee SP Voting.

Straight Party Polling Place:
Repub=4782; Dem=3384; Diff=1398
Bush won the SP Polling Place Voting.

While this doesn’t explain the entire reversal between Absentee and Polling Place Voting, it is generally consistent with the non-straight party voting results.

The answer does not seem to be directly related to undervotes as there were less than 100 altogether.

I think we need to look at this further, but I’m posting it now to get it out there so people can speculate.

Here again is the link provided by ISUGRADIA with the Story County results:
<http://www.storycounty.com/auditor/GEMSSOVCREPORT2.pdf>
Note that only Total Votes and Absentee Votes are given, so you have to extrapolate the Polling Place Votes from this data. They are therefore hidden, but they are in there!

Does anyone know if it’s common to see such a large discrepancy between absentee and polling place results in the same county or should we suspect fowl play?

If we can show that a hotly contested swing state such as IA may have gotten the results wrong, the next steps are obvious.