The Ohio Secretary of State has finally published the precinct-level vote tallies and the results are chilling. I have plotted the results between Obama/McCain and Obama/Romney with the precincts ordered from largest to smallest. In the 2008 election McCain had a 51,000 vote lead over Obama (12% of the state vote coming from the 735 largest voting precincts in the state). In 2012, for the 735 largest precincts, Obama and Romney were in a dead even tie.
The reason I wanted to do this is because of the allegations by the shadowy hacker group Anonymous that they had thwarted Karl Rove's attempts to steal the election by vote tampering. Not to mention Karl Rove's incredulity at the election results.
I have been trying to understand these graphs, they look horrible, I can't figure it out.
The excel spreadsheets of precinct-level data can be found on the Ohio Secretary of State here:
2008
2012
The following are graphs produced from the precinct level vote totals.
these graphs show the total percent of the vote given to each candidate from largest to smallest precinct. For example, in the following graph, the McCain lead (red) falls to Obama right about the 6000th largest precinct.
Note: click on graph to see a larger version
Instead of starting off 7 points behind in the largest precincts, in 2012 Barack Obama (blue) started with an extremely high point lead that lasted through the largest 600 precincts and through the entire tally, he was never more than 2 points behind Romney (Red).
The question I have after these two graphs are:
1. what kind of precinct-level changes had to happen to shift the 1000 largest reporting precincts (about 18.5% of the total state vote) to swing over 7 points toward Obama in 2012?
2. If that kind of precinct level manipulation is untenable, is this an indication of vote switching that occurred in these larger precincts in 2008?
3. Perhaps this is a strategy to push Democratically leaning voters to longer lines, more easily slowed down by voter ID laws?
4. Does anybody from Ohio know the answer to these questions?
I also did a zoom of the largest precincts reporting. In these graphs the scale is percent of total vote reporting. So the graph shows the results of 12% of the total Ohio electorate that voted in the very largest precincts in the state for both 2008 and 2012, notice the flabbergasting differences!
In the 2008 election, With 12% of the total votes cast from the largest precincts (about 667,000 total votes cast) John McCain (red) started off with a very strong positive vote lead margin of +51,474 votes over Obama.
If the Obama vote areas are the urban counties with the highest population density, how is it that the largest precincts all went to McCain so heavily in 2008?
In 2012 those votes from the largest precincts evaporated and went overwhelmingly to Obama.
So the question is, what the hell is going on here? how the hell do you swing 51,474 votes away from the largest precincts legally?
Is this an indication of vote tampering of electronic voting machines (switching votes from the largest precincts)? or is it republican operatives changing the numbers and locations of precincts, moving massive amounts of machines and infrastructure into republican regions to facilitate their votes (and making democratic votes harder)?
can it be any thing else???