Back to the "Yankee Panky" business.
Since Dan mentioned those of us who were involved in the Florida 13th congressional district case, in which 18,000 votes were lost by the electronic voting machines, I thought I would take the bait and do a little sleuthing of the sort that convinced there was something to pursue in Florida four years ago.
The following link (I hope) will pull up a PDF document with a bunch of pictures that provide various ways of comparing the votes for Democrats and Republicans, by town, in the 2006 gubernatorial, 2008 presidential, and 2010 gubernatorial elections. The observations are at the town level.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8815302/ct_graphs.pdf.
Bridgeport is a bit of an outlier, but not of the sort that made our eyes bug out when we saw what was going on in Florida.
The very first graph shows what I think the most important pattern in Connecticut is: it graphs the CHANGE in total Democratic votes for governor, from 2006 to 2010, against the change in total Republican votes for governor. Note that overall, the relationship is negative and hugs the negative diagonal line; this describes total turnout staying roughly constant in each town, with votes just shifting (on net) from the Republican to the Democrat from 2006 to 2010. I've labeled Stamford (where Malloy used to be mayor) and Bridgeport. Bridgeport is certainly an outlier, but Stamford is an even bigger outlier. There are others, too, which are unlabeled.
The rest of the pack plots the following quantities, comparing 2010 with both 2006 (governor) and 2008 (president) (1) Democratic vote share, (2) total votes cast, (3) total votes cast for Democrat, and (4) total votes cast for Republican. I've marked with a "B" where Bridgeport is. Except for the total turnout graph, Bridgeport is a bit of an outlier, but not by much, and in some cases, there are other towns that are similar to Bridgeport.
So, Bridgeport certainly deserves close scrutiny, but Bridgeport certainly isn't off the charts. It wouldn't take many votes to shift Bridgeport back into the data cloud. I suspect there are some problems with the hand count there, but we shouldn't lose track to the big story in Connecticut, which is a very strong swing toward the Democrats in the gubernatorial race, compared to 2006.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Housemaster of McCormick Hall
Department of Political Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E53-449
30 Wadsworth Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Office: 617-253-3127
-----Original Message-----
From: election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu [mailto:election-law-
bounces@mailman.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Lowenstein, Daniel
Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2010 1:17 AM
To: election-law@mailman.lls.edu
Subject: [EL] Yankee Panky
"Foley faces uphill battle in election challenge"
The Connecticut Post offers this
report<http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-
battle-in-election-challenge-801389.php>.
(http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-battle-
in-election-challenge-801389.php)
Posted by Rick Hasen at 04:55
PM<http://electionlawblog.org/archives/017867.html>
According to the above article, cited by Rick and
relying extensively on our Ned Foley, the chances of the
Republican gubernatorial candidate getting relief in Connecticut
are pretty small.
Still, there are questions of at least academic interest
raised by what seems to have happened in Bridgeport in this
election. According to an editorial entitled "Yankee Panky" in
today's Wall Street Journal, insufficient ballots were printed so
that blank ballots had to be photocopied in city offices on
election day. The Journal points to questions thus raised about
the custody of these ballots (though it does not say how many
such photocopied ballots there were). The editorial also states
Bridgeport failed to meet the Wednesday deadline for reporting
results and on Thursday produced hundreds of ballots that had not
previously been counted. (Given the 6,000 vote margin for
Democrat Dan Malloy over Republican Tom Foley, these hundreds of
ballots could not have been decisive, whatever the story behind
them.) The editorial suggests other possible irregularities, but
the passage I want to point to is this:
"The current count in [Bridgeport] shows Mr. Foley
receiving fewer than half as many votes as the GOP candidate
received in 2006, while Democratic votes increased by almost 60%.
Mr. Foley was leading by 8,409 votes before the Bridgeport votes
were counted."
In 2006, Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat
Christine Jennings in a close Florida congressional race in which
there was a serious apparent anomaly in the returns from
Democratic-leaning Sarasota County. Some 18,000 electronic
ballots contained no vote in the House race. Election law
scholars and political scientists did an excellent job of
scrutinizing that election. The conclusion reached independently
by many scholars (including in a good article in the Election Law
Journal) was that the missing votes resulted from a regrettable
design of the voting screen that made it easy to overlook the
House election.
The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is
capable of hyperbole. Still, the figures contained in the above
quotation, especially given the Democratic tide in 2006 and the
Republican tide in 2010, seem to bear scrutiny. I hope that some
of our scholars who are qualified for such research will
scrutinize the Bridgeport results with the same care they devoted
to the 2006 Sarasota results, whether or not candidate Foley
succeeds in getting the Connecticut courts to look into the
matter.
The link for the WSJ editorial is as follows.
However, the full text seems to be for subscribers only.
http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-battle-in-
election-challenge-801389.php
Best,
Daniel H. Lowenstein
Director, Center for the Liberal Arts and Free
Institutions (CLAFI)
UCLA Law School
405 Hilgard
Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
310-825-5148
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