Misguided Media?
Keith Olberman of MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olberman" has begun talking about alleged "voting irregularities" in Florida. Specifically talking about a story that has been circulating amongst the Moore'ish clans of extreme left-wing liberalism. Mr. Olberman states in his blog that:
Which is the same story being reported by Mr. Michael Moore et al via the "USTogether.org" website where the claim is made that certain counties in Florida must have been rigged (well, ok, that site doesn't say that explicitly but it does imply it, and Mr. Thom Hartmann says it very explicity on Common Dreams) because they have a larger number of registered Democrats than Republicans yet they voted in large numbers for President Bush. I thought this seemed odd and being a good citizen decided to dig a little deeper. Let's look at just one county, specifically the one mentioned in Mr. Olbermans web log as he, being a member of the media, has the largest reach and therefore should have done the most "homework" on the story. Mr. Olberman mentions Liberty county as an example of this supposedly odd voting pattern. Here are the results from the Florida Department of Elections for the 2004 Presidential Election:
Bush 1927
Kerry 1070
For a county that is largely Democrats it does seem odd no?
Here's 2000:
Bush 1317
Gore 1017
Hmmm, ok, well, 2000 was a disputed election anyway (never mind that I can find no evidence of them using the Eagle Optech IIIp "MarkSense" ballot system then (Side Note: this is the same system used by San Francisco, the bastion of left wing extremeism)) let's go back a bit more shall we?
Results from 1996:
Bob Dole 913
Bill Clinton 868
Ummm...how about 1992?
George Bush 1126
Bill Clinton 820
err, 1988?
George Bush 1419
Michael S. Dukakis 709
1984?
Ronald Reagan 1409
Walter F. Mondale 649
1980 (last year available online from Florida Department of Elections)
Jimmy Carter 1111
Ronald Reagan 895
Aha! There's our evidence of it being a Democrat stronghold county! It voted Democrat 24 years ago and ever since then the Republican votes have been "abberations. "
As time allows, I will be going through the data in more detail and presenting more evidence of the voting patterns in these counties hopefully cross-referenced with Census data. So far the voting patterns are consistent in Alachua, Baker, Bay, Lafayette and Liberty counties with these counties voting consistently Republican for the last 24 years. The only real abberation has been Calhoun county which voted for the Republican candidate in every year except 1996 and 1980 when they voted for Presidents Clinton and Carter respectively and Madison county which has voted for the Republican in every election except 1996, 1992 and 1980 even then they still leaned Republican. 1996 in Madison was decided by 596 votes for Clinton, 1992 by 638 votes for Clinton and in 1980 854 votes for Carter.
Source data for this analysis was acquired from Florida Department of Elections website. The data was downloaded and imported into a SQL Server 7.0 SP4 server. Each election was downloaded into a seperate table. A query was then run on each table independently. The query text was:
Select CountyName, CanNameFirst, Sum(CanVotes) as 'VoteCount' From tblFloridaData[YearOfRace]
Where RaceCode ='PRE' and CountyName = '[Name of County]'
Group By CountyName, CanNameFirstOrder By CountyName ASC, 'VoteCount' DESC
There [Florida], 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County - Bristol, Florida and environs - where it’s 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush.
Which is the same story being reported by Mr. Michael Moore et al via the "USTogether.org" website where the claim is made that certain counties in Florida must have been rigged (well, ok, that site doesn't say that explicitly but it does imply it, and Mr. Thom Hartmann says it very explicity on Common Dreams) because they have a larger number of registered Democrats than Republicans yet they voted in large numbers for President Bush. I thought this seemed odd and being a good citizen decided to dig a little deeper. Let's look at just one county, specifically the one mentioned in Mr. Olbermans web log as he, being a member of the media, has the largest reach and therefore should have done the most "homework" on the story. Mr. Olberman mentions Liberty county as an example of this supposedly odd voting pattern. Here are the results from the Florida Department of Elections for the 2004 Presidential Election:
Bush 1927
Kerry 1070
For a county that is largely Democrats it does seem odd no?
Here's 2000:
Bush 1317
Gore 1017
Hmmm, ok, well, 2000 was a disputed election anyway (never mind that I can find no evidence of them using the Eagle Optech IIIp "MarkSense" ballot system then (Side Note: this is the same system used by San Francisco, the bastion of left wing extremeism)) let's go back a bit more shall we?
Results from 1996:
Bob Dole 913
Bill Clinton 868
Ummm...how about 1992?
George Bush 1126
Bill Clinton 820
err, 1988?
George Bush 1419
Michael S. Dukakis 709
1984?
Ronald Reagan 1409
Walter F. Mondale 649
1980 (last year available online from Florida Department of Elections)
Jimmy Carter 1111
Ronald Reagan 895
Aha! There's our evidence of it being a Democrat stronghold county! It voted Democrat 24 years ago and ever since then the Republican votes have been "abberations. "
As time allows, I will be going through the data in more detail and presenting more evidence of the voting patterns in these counties hopefully cross-referenced with Census data. So far the voting patterns are consistent in Alachua, Baker, Bay, Lafayette and Liberty counties with these counties voting consistently Republican for the last 24 years. The only real abberation has been Calhoun county which voted for the Republican candidate in every year except 1996 and 1980 when they voted for Presidents Clinton and Carter respectively and Madison county which has voted for the Republican in every election except 1996, 1992 and 1980 even then they still leaned Republican. 1996 in Madison was decided by 596 votes for Clinton, 1992 by 638 votes for Clinton and in 1980 854 votes for Carter.
Source data for this analysis was acquired from Florida Department of Elections website. The data was downloaded and imported into a SQL Server 7.0 SP4 server. Each election was downloaded into a seperate table. A query was then run on each table independently. The query text was:
Select CountyName, CanNameFirst, Sum(CanVotes) as 'VoteCount' From tblFloridaData[YearOfRace]
Where RaceCode ='PRE' and CountyName = '[Name of County]'
Group By CountyName, CanNameFirstOrder By CountyName ASC, 'VoteCount' DESC
