2006 Senate Results in 17 Ohio Counties Cannot Be Right

R. H. Phillips grants permission to copy and distribute ONLY if reproduced exactly as printed here, in its entirety.

[To download the complete report with data tables, click here for PDF file ]

In the 2006 general election, according to the official website of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, there were 4,177,498 ballots cast in the State of Ohio. Of these, only 3,831,716, or 91.72%, contained votes for Governor, and only 3,826,829, or 91.61%, contained votes for United States Senate.

These numbers create the appearance of undervote (or overvote) rates of 8.28% and 8.39%, respectively, in the two most hotly contested statewide races on the ballot.
When the unofficial election results are examined county by county, there is a strikingly abnormal distribution of undervotes and overvotes.
I have chosen the United States Senate race to examine in detail because there were only two candidates on the ballot (and one write-in candidate), which makes the mathematical analysis simpler than for the Governor's race, in which there were four candidates on the ballot (and two write-in candidates).

A similar analysis could be done, and should be done, for the Governor's race, and for all races in which the unofficial results were very close. The methodology was simple. The percentage of undervotes and overvotes for each county was derived by fifth-grade mathematics. The total number of votes counted for the candidates combined was subtracted from the number of ballots cast. The remainder is the number of uncounted ballots, or undervotes plus overvotes. This number was divided by the number of ballots cast to determine the percentage of ballots left uncounted in each county. The complete data set for all 88 counties is appended to this paper.

There are 88 counties in Ohio. Of these 88 counties, according to unofficial results posted by J. Kenneth Blackwell, 71 counties had rates of undervotes and overvotes ranging from 0.88% (in Greene County) to 6.90% (in Holmes County). In 62 of these 71 counties, the percentages were tightly clustered between 2.00% and 4.50%. The rate in these 71 counties combined was 2.99%.

In 16 of the other 17 counties, including 4 of the 10 most populous counties in the State of Ohio, the percentages of undervotes and overvotes were clearly anomalous, ranging from 11.91% (in Montgomery County) to 26.48% (in Cuyahoga County), with a combined rate of 19.46%, or six and one-half times the rate in the rest of the state.

Just four counties -- Cuyahoga, Lucas, Montgomery and Stark -- accounted for 219,332 undervotes and overvotes, or 62.55% of the statewide total of 350,669. Cuyahoga County alone accounted for 148,928 undervotes and overvotes, or 42.47% of the statewide total. It is difficult to believe that more than one in four voters in Cuyahoga County could not decide between Sherrod Brown and Mike DeWine.

Click here to download a map showing type of voting machine used in each Ohio county for the 2006 midterm elections.

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R. H. Phillips' report was based on the unofficial election results available at the time the report was written.

Since then, Ohio has released the final, official returns for U.S. Senate in Ohio, 2006.
The official returns are posted online at [http://www.sos.state.oh.us/SOS/ElectionsVoter/results2006.aspx?Section=1846].

A PDF file of the official 2006 Ohio returns for U.S. Senate can be downloaded here.