Tuesday, January 18, 2005

PD Analysis: Cleveland Suburban Precincts Busiest

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports on it's analysis of the distribution of voting machines in Cuyahoga county. It's findings:
But a Plain Dealer analysis shows that, in Cuyahoga County at least, the elections board distributed machines equally to city and suburban polling locations...

Before the Nov. 2 election, the elections board allotted each Cleveland precinct one machine for every 117 registered voters within its boundaries - the same ratio of machines that suburban precincts received.

In other words, the more registered voters a particular precinct had, the more machines it received, regardless of where that precinct was.

And in the end, the busiest precincts - when measured by the number of ballots cast per machine - were actually in the suburbs, not Cleveland, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

If this sounds like a duplicate of a previous post, it should. The Columbus Dispatch reported it's analysis of Franklin county precincts a month ago.

As previously noted, the Dispatch also found that Republican leaning districts in Franklin county were busier (again, as measured by ballots cast per machine), than Democratic leaning districts.

Given the analysis of two out of Ohio's three major cities, one can only assume that John Kerry was talking about another state when he said the following at an MLK Breakfast on Monday:
"Voting machines were distributed in uneven ways. In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, eleven hours to vote, while Republicans sorted through in ten minutes - same voting machines, same process, our America."
Hat Tip: JawsBlog