Three years late but it was just pointed out to me that the answer becomes obvious when looking at the vote totals.
1976: 217 R 131 D
1980: 290 R 109 D
1984: 296 R 227 D
1988: 272 R 132 D
Mondale didn't have this stunning improvement over Carter, someone accidentally wrote down 227 instead of 127 and it never got caught.
How is this confirmed, by who? I hadn’t seen that, but it would be a logical answer to a very odd result in such a low populated county.
It's not
confirmed confirmed, but Mondale gained ~100 new democratic voters compared to the elections immediately preceding and succeeding this one while other votes were mostly static
and he also got dozens more votes than D state row office candidates while, again, the R votes were static.Also the results spreadsheet lists the number of people voting in Daggett county as only 429; adding up all the votes for president in 1984 gives a total vote count of 525. There were more votes for president than people voting. It's extremely obvious what happened here. Actual total votes for president was 425 plus 4 write-ins or undervotes, Mondale got 100 more votes recorded than he should have.