Classic Rovian Misdirection

Here are some hard facts about Florida's voting.

It wasn't the touchscreen, paperless voting that produced the anomolous results. It was the optical scan voting in very small Florida counties that produced an amazing number of huge Bush majorities in counties in which the overwhelming majority of registered voters are democrats.

The following table is a list of all the counties in Florida in which there were approximately 20,000 or fewer votes cast. What you see over and over again is that counties with huge majorities of registered democrats voted overwhelmingly republican. If you focus on the percentages in the leftmost column, the "percent change" is the amount by which actual votes cast exceed the vote that would have been projected by assuming that each voter in the county voted in accordance with their party affiliation. A "100%" or higher figure for republicans indicates a huge Bush majority in a county that was overwhelmingly comprised of registered democrats. This phenomenon is simply not observed in the larger counties. Only two counties in which 20,000 or more votes were cast had a 100% republican vote variation from the projected vote based on party affiliation (and both of those counties, Columbia and Putnam, were also relaively small, i.e., approximately 30,000 or fewer votes cast), and yet every single county in Florida in which 20,000 or fewer votes were cast exhibited a 90% pro-Bush variance relative to projections based on party affiliation. There are 38 counties in Florida where more votes were cast than in Putnam county, and not a single one approached a 90% variance (the highest such variance being 61% in Bay county).



The other side of the story is that a similar phenomenon, albeit less pronounced, is observed in the 2000 election. But Jeb was Gov in 2000, too. And remember, no one recounted the small counties, as Gore focused his firepower on the larger counties with potentially rich undercount totals. The interesting thing is that this phenomenon is virtually absent in the last pre-Jeb election in Florida, 1996, in which Bill Clinton even won some of these small counties. Sure, Bill was a southernor, but Gore was too. And Gore actually got a higher percentage of the statewide vote in 2000 than Clinton received in 1996.

Bottom line: since the Bushies have taken control of Florida, we've seen a tidal shift in the small counties to almost Saddam-like republican majorities.

There's a paper trail somewhere. It would be startling to find that they hadn't already covered their tracks, but even if they have there are people who know about this, and someone who will confound the Rove postulate that humans are infintely corruptible.

These are small counties. Let's do some manual recounts and compare to the op-scan totals. It will not be a huge undertaking.