The Official Absentee & Early Voting Reports Thread

[Lief 🗽]

Today NBC moved NV to lean Obama from tossup. Chuck Todd and Jon Ralston talked about how the early vote, demographics and the Las Vegas area unions are taking NV out of play for Romney. But Romney is visiting Reno today I think, so they havent given up yet.

Romney can't be seen to be giving up. His strategy now is 100% confidence to generate momentum, because if the election were held today, he'd lose the EV even if he won the PV.

Both NV's polling and early voting is trending Romney.  NV is on my "possible" list, but I credited it for Obama, because the polling tended to be off in 2008.  It is possible that Romney could take it. 

Registration in Nevada points to a larger victory than that.

It was 44/35.7 D/R in 2008.  It is 41.9/34.7 now.  D -2.1

So Obama wins by 10 points instead of 12. You can play this game as long as you want, but the fundamentals point to moderate Obama victory here. There's a reason people are moving it to lean Obama and the Obama campaign is not putting its new 1 minute closing ad there.

[Lief 🗽]

Democratic precincts at 98% of 2008 turnout is also pretty fantastic. Virginia will be close either way.

[Lief 🗽]

You should invest in a calculator bro. Your math stinks.

[Lief 🗽]

If Republican turnout is 124% of what it was in 2008, and Democratic turnout is 98% of what it was, Romney would win 74 million votes to Obama's 68 million votes. That's far from a nationwide landslide in which Obama would only win three states.

[Lief 🗽]

Democrats netted another 5000 votes in Clark County today, bringing their lead in the county to 23,000. Nevada continues to slip away.

[Lief 🗽]

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[Lief 🗽]

Democrats netted another 5000 votes in Clark County today, bringing their lead in the county to 23,000. Nevada continues to slip away.

Clark Co. shows a closing of 2.1 points from 2008 total, so far.  Obama will win early voting across the US, but by greatly reduced numbers.

You keep repeating that like it's significant. It's not. Romney needs to close by three or four times that to even have a chance. He's only going to get about a 30,000 vote margin in rural Nevada to offset Obama's margin in Clark County (Washoe is likely to be a wash). Obama's already at a 25,000 margin in Clark after just four days.

[Lief 🗽]

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

[Lief 🗽]

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Then perhaps you should be panicking. 

If I started panicking every time I had no idea what you were trying to say, I'd be dead.

[Lief 🗽]

Once again, for the seventeenth time, Ohio does not have party registration, those party figures are meaningless, anyone who is treating them seriously (including that CNN reporter) is laughably uninformed about this sort of stuff.

[Lief 🗽]

Your "party" in Ohio is just a record of the last primary election you voted in. In 2008, 2.4 million Ohioans voted in the Dem primary, 0.5 million in the GOP primary. This year, it was 1.1 million in the Dem primary and 1.2 million in the GOP primary. So you can't really draw any concrete conclusions through a comparison of 2012 and 2008, at least by looking at the party "registration" of the voters. Michael McDonald, a (as far as I know) non-partisan George Mason professor who's sort of an expert on early voting, wrote the following about the state last Friday:

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Advantage Romney!

But not so fast, let's look a the actual numbers that Cuyahoga so helpfully posts online.

As of Thursday's report, there are 124,967 Cuyahoga registered voters who most recently participated in a Republican primary, or 13 percent of all registered voters. There are 17,133 such persons who have voted, or 21 percent of all voters. So far the story is mostly true; perhaps it is based on an earlier Cuyahoga report.

But what about the voters who last participated in a Democratic primary? They are 343,392 of all registered voters, or 37 percent. 49,720 of these folks have voted, or 60 percent. Comparably, a larger percentage of "Democrats" have voted early in Cuyahoga than Republicans, compared to their base registration statistics.

Advantage Obama!

Before we draw that conclusion, let's understand what is really going on here. 2.4 million Ohioans voted in the 2008 Democratic primary, compared to 0.5 million in the Republican primary. Over the course of four years, some of these people were purged from the voter rolls. In 2012, 1.1 million Ohioans voted in the Democratic primary, and 1.2 million voted in the Republican primary. I suspect that there were a good number of Democrats who crossed over and voted in the Republican primary just because it was the more interesting race from the presidential perspective. In Ohio, all of these folks are now labeled Republicans. "Party" is so hopelessly confounded in Ohio that it is next to meaningless to divine who is ahead.

The Cuyahoga numbers do reveal something about early voters. They are highly participatory people who tend to vote in primaries. There are 458,193, or 49 percent, Cuyahoga registered voters who have no record of voting in any primary. Only 15,835 have voted so far, or 19 percent. Let me put this another way, people who vote the earliest are people who just generally vote.

I thus take the same conclusion from the CNN story:

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Just because Romney has a better ground game than McCain, that does not mean that Obama has not stepped up efforts, too. The Cuyahoga numbers show evidence that Obama's campaign is at least keeping pace with Republicans, if not outpacing them.

Looking across the Ohio counties, it appears that early voting is up everywhere across the state. Both campaigns are hard at work through the extended early voting period. Ohio is ground zero for this election, but we already knew that.[/quote]

link

[Lief 🗽]

No problem. I understand parties, whether the Democrats or the Republicans, twisting the information like this, but the fact that CNN needs to be fact-checked on such a basic fact about early voting in Ohio is really appalling to me.

[Lief 🗽]

Dems added another 6000 votes to their Clark County margin today. Dominating.

[Lief 🗽]

Including absentees, Democrats now have a 30,500 raw vote margin in Clark County. Republicans are coming nowhere close to closing the gap.

[Lief 🗽]

No it hasn't? It was 25,000 end of the day Tuesday, and 30,500 end of the day Wednesday. How is that a decreasing gap?

[Lief 🗽]

No it hasn't? It was 25,000 end of the day Tuesday, and 30,500 end of the day Wednesday. How is that a decreasing gap?

The R's had more voters out than the D's on that day. 

No... or else the Democratic lead wouldn't have increased by 5,000...

[Lief 🗽]

No it hasn't? It was 25,000 end of the day Tuesday, and 30,500 end of the day Wednesday. How is that a decreasing gap?

The R's had more voters out than the D's on that day. 

No... or else the Democratic lead wouldn't have increased by 5,000...

Lief, you can have 5000 D's show up and 8000 R's show up.  The percentage of R's increased. 

You can't have 5000 Ds show up and 8000 Rs show up and have the Democratic margin increase though. It's simple math.

[Lief 🗽]

No it hasn't? It was 25,000 end of the day Tuesday, and 30,500 end of the day Wednesday. How is that a decreasing gap?

The R's had more voters out than the D's on that day. 

No... or else the Democratic lead wouldn't have increased by 5,000...

Lief, you can have 5000 D's show up and 8000 R's show up.  The percentage of R's increased. 

You can't have 5000 Ds show up and 8000 Rs show up and have the Democratic margin increase though. It's simple math.

We didn't have that.  The percentage of D voters decreased in Clark. 

We did have that. There were 25,000 more Democratic ballots than Republican ballots at the end of Tuesday. Then there was a total of 30,500 more Democratic ballots than Republican ballots at the end of Wednesday. The Democratic margin therefore increased by 5,500 votes. How is this so difficult to understand??!??!?!?!

[Lief 🗽]

Jon Ralston's twitter account (link):

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And then eight hours later:

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[Lief 🗽]

It tells us that Rs got 6000 votes fewer than the Ds did that day. Which is more important than the assertion that they lost by slightly less than they did before.

[Lief 🗽]

NO IT'S NOT

IT'S NOT POSSIBLE FOR THE TOTAL DEMOCRATIC MARGIN TO HAVE GONE UP YESTERDAY IF MORE REPUBLICANS THAN DEMOCRATS VOTED YESTERDAY

THAT IS NOT HOW MATH WORKS

[Lief 🗽]

Okay, I think I found results for yesterday for Clark County. (The data from the Clark County government site is in .exe format which I can't open on my Mac, so I had to hunt around the internet and finally found a right-wing blog that looked semi-legit.)

Democrats: 14,934
Republicans: 9,725
Other: 5,900

So, as should be obvious, more Democrats than Republicans voted in Clark County yesterday.

[Lief 🗽]

Thank you!

[Lief 🗽]

Another +5,500 votes in Clark. Democrats aren't slowing down at all.

[Lief 🗽]

After one week, the Democrats are up 40,000 in Clark County and tied in Washoe. Republicans need to do a lot better in both.