Innumeracy

As a person who gets most of his news from writers who specialize in one subject, I can sometimes miss stories about other things that are going on in the world.  Fortunately, I have news junkie Facebook friends who can fill in some of the blanks.  Sometimes the stories seem interesting enough to merit further research, and sometimes the results of that research can be entertaining.  Like this one from one of my Fair and Balanced friends:



I clicked on the article in question and found that Republican candidate, and Tea Party Favorite, Allen West was wanting a recount of votes in St Lucie County, FL because 141% of the registered voters in the county had voted in the election.  In fact, all precincts in the county had extraordinary voter turnout; between 113% and 158.85%.  Massive voter fraud, right?  I decided to check it out.

    I found several articles that explained what was going on, but one from freerepublic.com put it in chart form.  There are 175,554 registered voters in St Lucie County.  Voting was done on a two card ballot.  Both cards were two sided giving voters the opportunity to vote for candidates for public office on card 1 and 11 Constitutional ballot initiatives on card 2.  So the ratio of ballot cards to voters was 2:1.  If every registered voter had come to vote, and had used both cards, the relative number of ballots cast would have been 200% of the number of registerd voters.

    But everybody did not show up to vote.  Out of 175,554 registered voters, only 124,031 voters actually showed up.  That's 70.7%.  At a ratio of 2:1, that leaves the possibility of 248,062 ballot card being cast.  But some voters (249 of them) did not use both cards, which resulted in only 247,713 ballot cards being cast, which was 141.1% of the number of registered voters.  Other little details left the final tally of votes cast at  123,591.

    As you can see, I wrote this all out in short form above, believeing that a clear presentation of facts and data should lead to a logical conclusion.  I was ignored.

    Now, I don't know if Watchdog Wire originated this conspiracy theory, but it's astonishing to me that they didn't check the numbers before publishing it.  It got even worse further down in the article when they wrote, "Does each ballot consist of two cards? If yes, then there would be two times the number of cards as votes cast or in the case of St. Lucie County 175,554 times 2 there would be an expected 351,108 cards (two page ballots) cast.  However, according to the SOE there were 247,713 or 141.10% of cards cast. A valid question is what happened to the other 58.9% of cards cast?"

 

     *facepalm*

Anyway, the news today is that Allen West got his recount, and his opponent, Patrick Murphy, gained 242 votes after the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections completed its re-tabulation, increasing his lead to more than 2,100 votes over West.

Not a word from my Fair and Balanced friends.