Gambier is a tiny town in rural Knox County, about 90 minutes northeast of Columbus. It’s where Kenyon College is and where my son cast his first vote. He tells me that there were only two machines for 1300 registered voters. There was an unprecedented turnout and one of the machines was frequently going out of service. Waits were up to 9 hours long.
Doubtlessly, needlessly long lines disenfranchised some Ohio voters. This is inexcusable. Does it help explain the apparent Bush victory? I doubt it.
What I saw on the street in Columbus was that the Republicans were better funded, better organized, and smarter about mobilizing their voters. I bet they also knew more about their people than the Democrats. The Democrats were polling, whereas the Republicans conducted a census. The Republicans were probably more successful in tailoring communications to individual voters and I’m sure they had a plan to get each one to the poll.
What will the Republicans do next with this machine? Rove and Norquist have been candid about plans for a political realignment. They are likely to have some success. Can the Democrats continue to block hard right judicial appointments? I also expect organized political pressure to bring the media into conformity.
{ 18 comments }
patrick 11.03.04 at 4:25 pm
Actually, I think this demonstrates a fundamental failure at realignment.
Rove simply ratcheted up his base another notch, which can be blocked by a corresponding increase on the other side of the coalition.
This election demonstrated zero capability of the Bushies to add new demographics to their coalition, even with terror and 9/11.
hmc 11.03.04 at 4:30 pm
I don’t understand–the media is not already “in conformity?” What more can be done? Outlaw ‘Mother Jones’ & ‘The Nation?’
hmc 11.03.04 at 4:32 pm
I don’t understand–the media is not already “in conformity?” What more can be done? Outlaw ‘Mother Jones’ & ‘The Nation?’
hmc 11.03.04 at 4:35 pm
I don’t understand–the (MS)Media is not already “in conformity?”
And I assume they realize that residual opposition press (‘The Nation’ & ‘Village Voice’, etc. represent less of a threat ignored than they would outlawed.
hmc 11.03.04 at 4:36 pm
I don’t understand–the (MS)Media is not already “in conformity?”
And I assume they realize that residual opposition press (‘The Nation’ & ‘Village Voice’, etc. represent less of a threat ignored than they would outlawed.
KCinDC 11.03.04 at 5:13 pm
I don’t see why the long lines don’t help explain the Bush victory. I don’t think that polling place was the only one with long lines, and few people are willing to stand in line for many hours to vote (and some are unable to stand that long).
No doubt many other voters were discouraged by challenges. Over 130,000 filed provisional ballots, presumably mostly people the challengers thought would vote for Kerry. I think that converting significant numbers of Kerry votes from “normal” votes into provisional ballots, which can be treated as unreal, was part of the Republican PR strategy. In winning the media game, a supposed margin of more than 100,000 votes is far better than a margin of only a couple of thousand or even hundreds.
jet 11.03.04 at 5:23 pm
Any know how the process for finding out what happened last night will occur? Will it just be Kerry supporters fighting Bush supporters with empty rhetoric about who’s vote was suppressed?
Or will there be data, studies, and investigations?
Jason 11.03.04 at 5:33 pm
The most interesting thing to me was the contrast between the exit poll and the outcome (I know, the exit poll wasn’t that bad in % points).
The question that raises to me is the influence of the exit poll on who votes. Do people look at the exit poll, and go ‘Oh my gosh, this is a close state, and the other guy is winning, let’s vote.’
tony 11.03.04 at 5:57 pm
I think that’s safe to assume. Or maybe Democrats would see a good poll and say, “Screw it – I’m not standing online if we’re already up 5 points.” I was following on CNN last night, and Bush’s campaign manager had an interesting point about how inaccurate exit polls are as a tool, and if an effect like this exists, how it may be better to just not use such a tool.
BillG 11.03.04 at 6:15 pm
Patrick — I hope you are right that the Republican’s hoped for demographic realignment failed.
Kcindc — The reason I suggested that long lines would not explain the Bush victory is that I am not sure that the people who could not vote would have been more likely to vote for Kerry.
these are both important empirical questions.
Matthew2 11.03.04 at 7:31 pm
The bad exit poll data is probably because people who voted Bush were ashamed and didn’t want to be polled or admit it.
james 11.03.04 at 7:40 pm
The most reasonable answers for flawed exit poles are volume and location. The large increase in voters would skew flawed pole results. The tendency to take the majority of exit poll information in cities (largely Democrat areas) increases the error.
An Ohio Democratic challenger 11.03.04 at 8:18 pm
Actually, most of the provisional ballots filed in Ohio were simple and appropriate: people who had moved, but not filed change-of-address forms. At the precinct where I was posted, the pollworkers were as helpful as they could be in getting people to the correct locations. Where I was, most of the provisionals were fairly young, and most were male–people who’d just moved are more likely to be people who move a lot.
After the flurry of court decisions Monday, it ended up that more Democratic challengers were present in the polling places than Republican challengers (e.g., I had no counterpart). I’ve heard no confirmed reports of Republican challengers actually challenging anyone, and many reports of well-run efficient polling places with one or two extra partisan observers who were entirely polite to each other and everyone else present. (The Republicans were apparently checking names off of some sort of list, and the pollworkers at my site had heard that there were, after all, more Republican challengers in heavily minority precincts.)
The lines in many places were dreadful (Oberlin experienced the same kinds of problems as Kenyon; the lines became parties, complete with food and live music). Blame the county BoE’s not believing their own registration numbers–it’s incompetence, not malice. And, for all cases with which I am familiar (in hotly contested northeast Ohio), the polls did stay open as long as necessary for those who got there by 7:30 to vote.
Much as I mourn the result of the election here, I feel–after watching a small slice of it (one precinct all day up to and including the counting and packaging of the ballots) up close and after talking with those who were running the Democratic “voter protection” effort around here–like it was basically fairly conducted.
The weak link is our horrible pastiche of local election administrations. So much of the data on voter rolls is nonsense (people who have moved away, people with data entry errors, etc), and there’s no way to coordinate these lists and make them any better. After watching get-out-the-vote activists try to figure out BoE lists, after watching voters say, “Uh, you have my dead father here, but not me,” to the pollworkers, after thinking a little about how simple all these problems render certain types of fraud—well, I wish we had national ID cards, or something, that would allow coordination. Make it simple, make it uniform, make it make sense.
Many voters don’t understand why they don’t need to show ID at the polls and would feel safer if they did. And I don’t think anyone can understand why registering in, say, a different state doesn’t automatically get you removed from your previous roll, or why the number of missed elections it takes to drop off the rolls varies so much from person to person, even on a single roll. Trust in the system would be higher (and, hopefully, unwarranted accusations of fraud would be rarer) if there were more consistency and more verifiability.
Ottnott 11.03.04 at 9:36 pm
Hmm. regarding the level of information on individual voters, I am reminded of a certain database project that the infamous John Poindexter was working on. And now we have the start of what could become an enormouns list of prescreened airline passengers.
I’ll just let my chip implant determine my next vote from my brain waves and cast it remotely via WiFi.
Gotta go polish my tinfoil hat now.
Tom T. 11.04.04 at 3:57 am
Knox County went for Bush 63-37.
cafl 11.04.04 at 4:43 pm
I worked for the Kerry campaign in Nevada over the weekend and through election day, and they had conducted a census and we did work successfully to get the targetted voters to the polls. In some types of districts (low income, highly mobile/transient) this can only be done with a large amount of human power to knock on doors. A better information system would have helped even here. I have a few ideas about this.
While we didn’t quite take Nevada blue, local Democrats in the targetted areas did win. More of that please.
anon 11.04.04 at 4:45 pm
I worked for the Kerry campaign in Nevada over the weekend and through election day, and they had conducted a census and we did work successfully to get the targetted voters to the polls. In some types of districts (low income, highly mobile/transient) this can only be done with a large amount of human power to knock on doors. A better information system would have helped even here. I have a few ideas about this.
While we didn’t quite take Nevada blue, local Democrats in the targetted areas did win. More of that please.
M D 11.06.04 at 6:28 pm
I can’t understand the planning here. 1300 voters, 2 machines? With an unreasonable two minute allowance per voter, each machine can handle 30 voters per hour. If the poles are open 14 hours, than one machine would accomadate 420 voters, at full capasity. Two machines would allow for 840 voters to cast their votes at the relentless pace of a 2 minute process. One could claim that the plan to have only two machines was a plan to not accomate the known number of registared voters.
Now how is it we plan to improve the math skills of this nation?
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