Something's rotten in the state of Denmark

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Blogosphere starts to take hold

I've been curious why more of the bigger bloggers haven't started running with this story. Mickey Kaus, to his great credit, has hinted towards the story, in his usual "please, debunk this" manner.

Shouldn't some major paper publish the definitive investigative piece debunking the various election-stealing theories now careening around the Web before they get out of hand? (Today, Countdown, tomorrow, the Globe!) I'm assuming they can be debunked. I'm hoping they can be debunked. But if they can't be debunked--er, that's a story too! ... (Josh Levin's day-after-the-election Slate piece was a step in the debunking direction but didn't cover the more recent paranoia, such as Countdown's Florida and Ohio innuendoes.) ... 11:06 P.M.
And today, Atrios comes in... with something a little peculiar:
To me, the most legitimate questions regarding vote counting irregularities involve Ohio. Two issues - in many Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) areas there are more votes than registered voters. And, perhaps more importantly, in many areas there's a mismatch between the number of votes counted at the ward level, and the number of votes counted in the township/municipality level, of which the wards appear to be subunits. I'd like an explanation for this.

And, more interestingly, reader c sent in an interesting tidbit. If you look at the townships for which the subunits don't add up, there's a surprising degree of regularity in the numbers. Specifically, if you calculate the difference between the municipality total and the sum of all of the individual ward numbers, strange patterns emerge...

I did this quickly, so I may have missed something, but here are the results:

Highland Heights: 1385
Mayfield Village: 1385
Seven Hills: 2147
Broadview Height: 2540
Berea: 3146
Olmstead Falls: 3146
North Royalton: 4009
Maple Heights: 4744
Brook Park: 5295
Oakwood Village: 5460
Euclid: 5724
South Euclid: 5724
Cleveland Heights: 6007
East Cleveland: 6007
Garfield Heights: 6170
Lakewood: 6226
Middleburg Heights: 7284
Parma: 7284
Bedford: 8553
Bedford Heights: 8553
Warrensville Heights: 8553
Bay Village: 9948
Fairview Park: 9948
North Olmstead: 9948
Rocky River: 9948
Westlake: 9948
Cleveland: 49324

There's probably a perfectly good explanation for this, though someone might want to figure out what it is. Oh reporters...
...to make clear, I wasn't being entirely facetious when I wrote that there could be a perfectly good explanation for this. So, if anyone has one......well, that's interesting. Within the last few minutes they changed all the numbers and now the problem has disappeared...

Curiouser and curiouser... when will Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan join the fray?