Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html

 

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies

 

By Sam Parry

November 9, 2004

 

George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of

Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the

unbelievable.

 

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that

exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction – because

of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans

in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote

total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in

four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

 

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered

Republicans.

 

By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85

percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9

million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

 

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only

about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide – statistically the

same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote – and

losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41

percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much

narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

 

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see

http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P & state=FL. For details

on the 2004 Florida turnout, see

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html]

 

Exit Poll Discrepancies

 

Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country –

especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry

winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among

rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote,

possibly through systematic computer hacking.

 

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of

mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states –

Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually

inconceivable.

 

" Exit polls are almost never wrong, " Morris wrote. " So reliable are

the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places

that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in

Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To

miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how

pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more

than honest error was at play here. "

 

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote

tampering – as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe –

Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were

part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and

thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the

networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's

conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have

agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter

deserves " more scrutiny and investigation. " [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

 

Erroneous Votes

 

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with

anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes

for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their

votes for Bush.

 

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting

system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban

Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

 

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know

whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling

pattern.

 

If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent

one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

 

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill

Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout

nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes

for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

 

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles

is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide

victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of

crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

 

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by

73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier.

But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964

to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced

George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

 

What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is

that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter

turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and

John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from

roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

 

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes

from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many

observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

 

Bush's Gains

 

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to

accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was

also substantially increasing its turnout?

 

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just

beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an

election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5

million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

 

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as

Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in

2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

 

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent

Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the

Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the

independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent

of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86

percent. [see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for

details.]

 

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among

Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents

represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did

better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49

percent to 48 percent margin.

 

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of

Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching

his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

 

Registration Up

 

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an

election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization

efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased

GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by

the Bush team to run to the base.

 

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove

and the Bush team made its goals clear – maximize Bush's support among

social and economic conservatives – including Evangelicals and Club

for Growth/anti-government conservatives – and turn them out by

driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's

leadership credentials.

 

This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election

that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove

strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

 

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these

Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of

Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves

about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

 

Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest

states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more

incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new

voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than

twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

 

Bush increased his turnout in all 67 Florida counties, marking the

second consecutive election in which Bush increased Republican vote

totals in all Florida counties, and overall achieved a 34 percent

increase in Florida votes over his 2000 total.

 

Since Bob Dole's 1996 turnout of 2.24 million Florida votes, Bush has

increased the GOP's performance in the state by an astonishing 74

percent. Making Bush's gains even more impressive, Kerry also saw

gains in all but five Florida counties and in 22 counties earned at

least 10,000 more votes than Gore earned in 2000.

 

Exceeding Kerry

 

But Bush's vote gains exceeded Kerry's in all the large counties in

the state except in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade, where Kerry

increased his turnout by 56,000 new votes compared with Bush's 40,000

new votes. This Democratic improvement in Miami-Dade seems to have

come in large part from Democratic success in registering new voters

in the county by almost a 2-to-1 margin over Republicans.

 

In spite of this new-voter registration advantage, Kerry only earned a

7-to-5 increase of new voter turnout over Bush in Miami-Dade, a

statistical oddity given the fact that Kerry did a better job than

Gore in turning out his Democratic base, earning a vote total equaling

85 percent of all registered Democrats in the county compared with

Gore's total in 2000 equaling 83 percent of all registered Democrats.

 

In other Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties,

Kerry gained 114,000 new voters, earning nearly 770,000 votes, and

bested Bush by more than 320,000 votes. But, this was actually a

modest improvement for Bush over 2000, thanks to Bush's increase of

119,000 new voters in these counties, from 330,000 votes in 2000 to

449,000 votes in 2004.

 

Bush's performance in these two counties is worth studying in greater

detail. In both counties, Democrats saw a significant increase in new

voter registration since 2000, more than 77,000 newly registered

Democrats in Broward and 34,000 newly registered Democrats in Palm Beach.

 

Republicans on the other hand only registered 17,000 new voters in

Broward and a bit more than 2,000 new voters in Palm Beach. While both

counties saw substantial numbers of new unaffiliated or third party

registered voters, the Democratic advantage in both counties combined

of more than 111,000 newly registered Dems against fewer than 20,000

newly registered GOP voters, as well as the voter intensity that these

new registration rates usually represent, suggested that Kerry should

have done better than Bush relative to the 2000 election.

 

Instead, Bush actually increased his vote total in the two counties by

earning about 5,000 more new voters than Kerry.

 

New Level

 

Beyond southern Florida, Bush took turnout throughout the state to a

new level, testing the bounds of statistical probability by winning

votes seemingly from every corner of the state, from the panhandle to

the Gulf Coast, from the I-4 corridor to the Atlantic Coast from

Jacksonville to Miami.

 

Another county worth examining in some detail is Orange County, a

swing county home to Orlando in the center of the state. As in

Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, Democrats successfully

registered substantially more new voters than Republicans, about

49,000 new Democrats against about 25,000 new Republicans.

 

These gains broke what was once a statistical tie in registered voters

between the parties, giving Democrats a 214,000 to 187,000 advantage

across the county. But Kerry only managed a narrow countywide victory

with 192,030 votes against 191,389 votes for Bush. In 2000, Gore

carried the county with 140,115 votes against 134,476 votes for Bush.

 

While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains

through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote

effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically

incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that

the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow

exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations.

 

Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much

hope of quelling these rising suspicions.