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August 19, 2005
The Paul Krugman Book Club
The lucky designee this month is Andrew Gumbel, whose book Steal This Vote is described by the Krugster as "judicious". And maybe it is:
Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.
Unfortunately, Krugman is not similarly judicious:
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.
Oh, really? Let's hear what the New Hour with Jim Lehrer, that notoriously conservative program had to say:
In the first full study of Florida's ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled "undervotes" -- ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through -- to be counted.
They do note one way in which Gore could have won:
While the USA Today report focused on what would have happened had the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount not been halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Herald pointed to one scenario under which Gore could have scored a narrow victory -- a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards. (Boldface added)
In their reports, the newspapers assumed counts already completed when the court-ordered recount was stopped would have been included in any official count. Thus, they allowed numbers from seven counties -- Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison -- to stand, but applied the most inclusive standards to votes in the rest of the state. If those numbers did not stand, the Herald reported, a more generous hypothetical revisited recount would have scored the White House for Gore -- but with only a 393-vote margin.
Under most other scenarios, the papers reported, Bush would have retained his lead.
But facts have never stopped Krugman. He goes on to talk about two studies of Ohio in 2004:
So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the other by the Democratic National Committee.
The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed. Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.
So even John Conyers and the DNC didn't think that Ohio was stolen? That might stop a smaller man, but not the Gnome of Princeton:
And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.
And so on. The Warren County story is true, but the Miami County story is nonsense. I took a look at Miami County over at Brainster's a couple weeks ago, when I first heard the 98.55% figure. Not having the number of registered voters, I instead examined the votes as a percentage of the population. Miami County had 51.6% of its population vote. Surrounding counties had between 47.0% and 52.4% of their population vote. So there is nothing unusual about Miami County's vote.
More important, these are fairly small counties. Bush got 68,000 votes in Warren County and 34,000 votes in Miami County. Throw all those votes out and Bush still wins Ohio by 16,000 votes.
More on Miami County:
Here's a liberal website, the Free Press (their slogan is "Speaking truth to power") with an article on Miami. The interesting thing is that the writer appears to document that one precinct in Miami County had a turnout of 98.55%, and another precinct had a turnout rate of 94.2%, and the rest ranged from 50% to 88%. So Krugman's obviously got his facts wrong; there's no way the entire county had a turnout of 98.55% if that was the turnout at the highest precinct. And if you look at this shocking precinct, President Bush won it by 363 votes in 2004 and 246 in 2000, so we're arguing about 117 net votes in a state that Bush won by 118,000.
And while the 98.55% turnout sounds suspicious, it is quite common for county officials to lump in the absentee ballots for the entire county with one or more precincts, resulting in extraordinary-sounding turnout levels.
John Ruberry has some interesting revelations about Paul Krugman's friends.
Posted by pat at August 19, 2005 11:37 AM
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Comments
You gotta to admit, that felon purge in Florida was inexcusable. Running people off of voter registration lists because their name is the same as a felon? Stupid.
And Harris wants to be Senator. The felon purge proves shes an idiot.
Posted by: paul at August 19, 2005 04:52 PM
They were required by law to purge the felons after the debacle of the Miami mayoral election. Greg Palast, who thinks the election was stolen, admits that only about 7.5% of those who received mailings were found to be erroneously listed, and all of those got their voting rights restored.
Posted by: Pat Curley at August 21, 2005 02:35 AM