An analysis of the Ohio vote turned up a very interesting statistical oddity: a Democratic candidate for Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court got much closer to her Republican opponent than did John Kerry to his Republican opponent.
The methodology of the study (summarized here) was somewhat circuitous. Simply put, the difference between Democratic Justice candidate C. Ellen Connally, an African-American, and Republican Thomas J. Moyer was often much narrower than the difference between Kerry and Bush. For example, in Butler County, Moyer outpolled Connally 66,625 to 59,532, while Bush beat Kerry 106,735 to 54,185. Hence, this study notes that there was a difference of over 45,000 votes between the margins of the candidates from the same party.
Generally speaking, Supreme Court races don't draw the same number of votes that the Presidential election does (that's the case here, with the total voting for Justice just under 80 percent of that for President). Since Supreme Court candidates -- with little name recognition -- are likely to gain a "coat-tails" effect as many people wvote a straight party ticket, etc., then the assumption is that the margins between candidates of the same party should be similar.
But there appears to be no coat-tails effect in Ohio; as a matter of fact, in many counties won by Bush, Kerry received fewer votes than did Connally (this happened in 12 counties; Bush had fewer than Moyer in four counties). It's hard to figure how a lesser-known Supreme Court candidate could out-poll the well-known Presidential candidate.
However, all that being said, here's the flipside. These numbers certainly give Dems something to sieze on and seem to reek of fraud, but this could also be some of that fuzzy math. Much like a similar oddity in Florida, this has to be taken in context. How do we get some context? Well, first off, despite the "margin difference" the overall race for President was much closer than that for Chief Justice; Bush (prior to those recounts) garnered 51 percent to Kerry's 48.5, while Moyer beat Connally 53.3 to 46.7.
Secondly, an important contextual angle can be found in history, namely, the 2000 election. In that contest, Bush carried Ohio over Al Gore, while Republican Deborah Cook bested Democrat Tim Black for a Supreme Court seat (there was no Chief Justice contest on the ballot) by about the same margin. And guess what? Black got more votes than Gore in well over 40 percent of the counties; Bush was out-polled by Cook in four counties -- the same number as this year. Gore made up for getting fewer votes than Black in 38 counties by getting far more votes than him in some of the larger counties. Statewide, the margin wasn't as wide as this year, but the trend was there.
So what's the explanation here? Well, if you want to continue with conspiracy theories, you'll probably say that the 2000 vote was rigged, because once you consider the 2000 results, what happened in 2004 isn't such a statistical oddity -- it's more of a political science oddity.
It's hard to explain away the difference; looking at the raw numbers, on the face it looks as if Kerry votes are just disappearing.
In the South, the remnants of past Democratic strength can be seen in the fact that state-level Democratic candidates can still get elected, even while Republicans are solidifying national offices; maybe it still works that way in Ohio. Maybe Bush voters are less likely to vote a straight ticket, and they either vote for the Dem for the court or don't vote in that race at all, although that argument is weakened by the fact that the Republican for the court actually won statewide by a larger percentage than did Bush in both elections.
Whatever the explanation, the fact that much the same thing happened in 2000 makes it much harder to hang your hat on this as proof of fraud. It's not that I think there was no foul-- once again, we don't need to go off tilting at windmills. We won't gain any credibility that way.
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