A couple of days ago I wrote something nice about the improved Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website and its rapid posting of last Tuesday's results. Well, be careful what you praise around here! Uberblogger Atrios took a look at the CCBoE's main results page, did a little math and got really confused, which has led to all kinds of mutterings about fraud, Diebold, suspect javacripts, etc. among his commenters. The word is clearly going out across blogland that the Ohio smoking gun has been found... or at least a thread that will unravel the scandal we're all looking for.
What got Atrios so confused? Well, it's the same thing that made me think that over 214,000 votes had been cast in the city of Cleveland, when I saw those results last Thursday. You see, the website says that over 214,000 ballots were cast in the city. It's only when you add up the numbers for the city wards, and find that the total is about 40,000 votes short of that 214,000, that it occurs to you that something is screwy.
In its presentation of "ballots cast" in the county's cities, villages, townships and wards, the Board has done a very strange and misleading thing -- it's posted municipal totals that are just plain wrong. And then it put a warning at the top of the page that's meant to tell you the numbers are wrong and you need to look elsewhere for the right numbers, but the warning doesn't actually say that. Here's the full text of the warning:
In even-numbered years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections tallies absentee ballots by Congressional, House, and Senate district combinations. Because of this, the ballots cast totals for municipalities on this web page and on the summary report needs to be derived by using the following technique: For municipalities with wards, find the ballots cast total for each ward and total them. For municipalities without wards, please refer to the contest of interest on the canvass report. Absentee ballots cast totals appear separately at the end of each contest on the canvass report. If you have any questions, please contact the Board of Election’s Ballot Department Manager at (216) 443-6454.Okay, do you have any idea what that they're talking about?
And does that "explanation" give you any clue why the Board hasn't just taken out the misleading numbers and put in the correct numbers?
Well, for whatever reason, they haven't. So when people all over the world come to our Board of Election's website for local results -- and believe me, lots of people are looking at that site -- what they find is bad information preceded by a gibberish cautionary note that says, deep down in its code, The information presented below is not to be taken seriously.
Welcome to Cleveland, Election Confusion Central. Have you heard about the time our river caught on fire?