Hackett Loses, to County with a "Technical Malfunction"

I will always be suspicious of close races in Ohio and Florida. Billmon has the inside scoop on Schmidt's late win:

Too Close for Comfort

If you followed the returns last night, you may have noticed that one county in the district -- Clermont -- was extremely late in reporting part of its returns. Clermont is the second largest pool of votes in the district and provided roughly a quarter of all ballots cast yesterday. It's also a GOP stronghold (in a GOP stronghold district) and Jean Schmidt's home turf.

That being the case, it's not a big surprise Schmidt did well there, carrying the county with 58% of the two-party vote -- less than what a GOP candidate can usually expect, but enough to give her nearly a 5,000 vote margin in Clermont, and thus the election.

At about 9:00 PM ET last night, however, things didn't look nearly as good for Ms. Schmidt. In fact, her name looked more like Schmud. With 88% of the district's precincts reporting, including more than half of Clermont's, the count was almost evenly split -- with Schmidt holding a lead of less than 900 votes.

At that point, though, the Clermont election bureau experienced a "technical malfunction" with its optical scan readers:

The Board of Elections in Clermont County, east of Cincinnati, says it's optical scanners haven't counted all the ballots yet because it was so hot -- and humid -- Tuesday.

Board member Tim Rudd says the ballots pick up moisture when it gets hot, making it tougher for the optical scan machines to sort and count.

According to some reports I've seen -- but haven't been able to confirm -- at least part of the count in Clermont's final 91 precincts ended up being done by hand.

In any case, when the humidity had cleared, so to speak, Schmidt had picked up another 9,451 votes, compared to just 6,300 or so for Hackett -- an edge which, interestingly enough, almost equaled her winning margin for the district as a whole.

Very convenient, no? Or, as one local reporter put it:

Schmidt led by less than 1 percent with 88 percent of the precincts in. But she must have felt secure in knowing that the only uncounted precincts were in Clermont County, her home.

Indeed. But was there anything, well, Floridian, about this particular source of comfort? Beats me. Hackett apparently doesn't think so. He conceded before midnight. But some others who watched the count much more closely than I did found it all a bit odd:

Out if 91 precincts [in Clermont], about 12% of the [district] total, the margin went from 0.89% to 3.49%. In other words it almost quadrupled . .

I was projecting that, extrapolating from the first 100 precincts, the last 91 would have about 10,000 votes. In fact, the final tally has them giving out 50% more than that...over 15,000 votes.

Also, while Schmidt's margin in the first 100 [precincts] was about 56% to 44%, the margin is much, much wider in the last 91 -- 60% to 40%.

Also, this puts the overall total well out of range of any recount margin.

Curioser and curiouser. I wouldn't dwell on it so much, if not for the fact that Clermont has already shown a impressive knack for pulling Republican electoral bacon out of the fire, as I noted last week:

The ability of the Rovians to pull fresh GOP votes out of [Warren and Clermont] counties certainly challenged plausibility, and, in Clermont's case, almost defied mathematics. Consider the fact that according to the Census Bureau, Clermont's population rose only 4.4% (about 7,800 souls) between 2000 and 2003, while reported GOP turnout increased by roughly 31% (about 14,600 votes) from 2000 to 2004. This in a county that only had about 122,000 registered voters last year, according to the Cincinatti Enquirer.

Others have highlighted some equally interesting data points from last year's election in Clermont:

Three counties in southwestern Ohio – Butler, Clermont and Warren – provided Bush with a combined plurality greater than his statewide margin of victory. These results, when examined at the precinct level, are almost impossible to explain . . . In Clermont County there were 24 such precincts where Kerry received fewer votes than Gore. In Warren County there were six entire townships where voter registration increased by 28% to 79%. In all three counties, Kerry received fewer votes than Ellen Connally, a little-known, underfunded African-American municipal judge from Cleveland, running for Chief Justice. There must have been at least 13,500 voters who supported both Connally and Bush, or else the certified results are fraudulent. In these three counties, and in Delaware County as well, Bush received more votes than Issue One, the constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. There must have been at least 10,500 supporters of gay marriage who voted for Bush, or else the certified results are fraudulent.

Of course, none of this proves, or even makes a circumstantial case, that yesterday's election was stolen. Maybe the inhabitants of Clerrmont County really are just unusually witless in their devotion to the GOP cause. I live in a Republican machine county myself, so I know how that goes.

But it's still rather remarkable how often the lightning seems to strike in Clermont -- and at the just the right time, producing just the right amount of votes for an otherwise endangered GOP candidate. Like I said, I'd feel a lot better about it if the party stalwarts who run the county's elections were describing the inner workings of the system to a grand jury -- under oath.