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Montgomery County There are 696 uncounted absentee ballots (2.38% of 29,298), and 4,387 uncounted regular ballots (1.70% of 258,337) in Montgomery County. These, along with any uncounted provisional ballots, need to be examined by hand during the recount. The same holds true for every other county in Ohio.
The strikingly partisan distribution of the uncounted ballots is nothing short of shocking. There are 588 precincts in Montgomery County. As the above table shows, the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4.0% or more in 47 precincts, and every single one of these precincts was won by John Kerry, nearly all of them by overwhelming margins. Only two were even close.
Altogether, in these 47 precincts, Kerry won 14,871 votes to 2,032 for Bush, a margin of 7 to 1. In these 47 precincts there are 920 uncounted regular ballots, or 21.0% of the county wide total. In the other 541 precincts in Montgomery County, among which the uncounted regular ballots are distributed at a rate of 6.4 per precinct, Kerry won 128,106 votes to 136,329 for Bush. Thus, 21.0% of the uncounted regular ballots are in 8.7% of the precincts that accounted for 6.0% of the votes in the county.
In these 47 precincts, which went for Kerry by a margin of 7 to 1, the “spoilage” rate of regular ballots was 5.16%, compared to 1.31% for the rest of the county, and 1.70% for the whole of the county.
There is an old political adage which says that only a close election can be stolen. In a close election, uncounted ballots can make all the difference. Richard Hayes Phillips, PhD
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