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Edited on Sat Jul-19-08 07:59 AM by OnTheOtherHand
It reflects an impressive amount of work. Phillips and his helpers looked at thousands of ballots and other poll records. He often gets into trouble when he tries to make inferences from the evidence.
Phillips has some fundamental misconceptions. One big one is that he thinks it's inherently incredible that C. Ellen Connally (Democratic candidate for Chief Justice) got more votes than John Kerry in some counties. Something like that happens in every Ohio election I've been able to get county-level judicial results for -- in more counties, in fact. It isn't surprising. This isn't a trivial error, because Phillips uses the existence of the "Connally anomaly" as the basis for estimating a swing of 120,000 votes, which is a big part of his argument.
On that point, Phillips has an auxiliary argument. He notes that Connally's vote share was about the same in the 12 "Connally anomaly" counties as in the rest of the counties that Bush won, but Kerry's share was lower. He infers that they are equally Democratic counties where Kerry was robbed of votes. But judicial races are nonpartisan on the ballot, so it's a bad idea to use them as a baseline for partisanship. If you look back to 2000 -- or even look at turnout in this year's primary -- these counties don't look comparable to the other counties he compared them to. He has other evidence from those counties, but I don't think it is very strong -- certainly not 120K strong.
He finds lots of mismatches between poll books and ballots. Some of those could be evidence of ballot box stuffing; it's hard to say. Again, a lot of his analysis is driven by tendentious assumptions about how Bush and Kerry voters 'should' have voted in the Chief Justice race, on Issue One, and sometimes in other races. He finds some "runs" of Bush and Kerry votes that indicate that someone sorted the ballots; it's not so clear whether anyone stuffed or changed them.
Some of the details in the book are just weird. For instance, there's a photograph of two ballots that he says are written in the same handwriting, although the letters aren't even formed in the same way. Or, when an election official tells him (ridiculously) that all the shop owners in the city of Delaware are gay, he treats that as evidence of a cover-up, when most people will read it as just another dumb thing someone said.
It has put a dent in my summer. Right now I have 27 single-spaced pages (with some pictures, at least) where I try to sort through his evidence. All his work could probably have been put to better use if he had talked with more people before diving in.
ETA: The book is organized in generally short chapters, many of which were previously published in the Columbus Free Press (several of these are updated for the book). So, the work on machine allocation in Franklin County and "caterpillar crawl" in Cuyahoga County is familiar.
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