County results that don't make sense

[Alcon]

There are a number of counties which have strange results that I've been unable to understand. Here's a few of mine. Feel free to contribute your thoughts or other counties that don't make sense.

Day County, SD - 91% white. Median household income of $15,856. Voted Kerry, 51-47. I suspect poverty may have been a factor in this result.

Steele County, ND - 98% white. Median household income is a not-too-bad $35,757 with a poverty rate of 5%. This county is pretty small, with only 2,258 people and 1,213 votes cast. Voted Kerry, 51-48. The city results hardly help: 4 of 5 precincts went Kerry. They were, by city: Sharon (60-38), Hope (52-48), and Luverne (64-34). There are two precincts in the county seat, Finley. One was 52-48 Kerry, and one was 61-38 Bush.

Those two are the only ones I can think of right now. Anyone have any ideas?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think Day is in the big spring wheat growing area. That part of SD has been usually Democratic for quite a while.
Don't know about Steele though. BRTD might know.

[Ebowed]

I think the number of votes in Loving county Tex. is greater than the population; that certaintly does not make sense.

I've been wondering about Loving.  From what I know (seeing as it almost always turns up on Dave's lists of "top five counties with least votes"), it looks to be a Republican stronghold.  They could move like 20 Democrats from Wyoming and the county would switch.

[minionofmidas]

Here's the last five elections for Loving County:
1988  77 votes Bush 70% Dukakis 30%
1992 96 votes Perot 47% Bush 32% Clinton 20%
1996 77 votes Dole 62% Perot 20% Clinton 18%
2000 156 votes Bush 80% Gore 19%
2004 80 votes Bush 81% Kerry 15%

The place got 53 inhabitants or something...they cleaned up their voter rolls after 2000. It's apparently not very difficult to vote more than once in Texas, provided you do it in different counties.
As for Perot's strength here - Loving also produced Wallace's best result in Texas.

[WMS]

I think the number of votes in Loving county Tex. is greater than the population; that certaintly does not make sense.

It could very well be incompetence and errors by both the Census Bureau and the County govermnent. Here's an example from Bernalillo County:

In comparing the 2000 election turnout numbers with the Census Bureau population numbers, I ended up with two precincts that had over 100% turnout. One I could fix, and one I couldn't.

In the case of the fixable one, the problem was that back in 1992 the precinct boundaries had changed, shrinking the precinct, but no one had updated the voter street records in that ENTIRE TIME, and so you had about 200 extra voters who weren't physically in the new precinct but were registered in that precinct (it was 400~ people and 600~ voters). Fixed in early 2002.

The unfixable one is, I am convinced, a case where the Census Bureau screwed up their geocoding and plunked an apartment complex's population in the wrong precinct*, thus resulting in way too many voters for the precinct's population. But the Census Bureau is highly hostile to suggestions for correcting their data, and my old supervisors don't care about accuracy that much - yes, they're Democrats - so that one remains wrong.

And then there's how hard it is to clean the voter file and get deadwood out of the voter rolls...

*Not the only time they've done that. There was another case where the Census Block with two apartment complexes on it had 0 people and the neighboring Census Block with a gas station and a J.C. Penney call center had several hundred people. I had to damn well move heaven and earth to get that fixed - good thing I know the head of the Planning and Zoning Department, since the Census Bureau wouldn't bother to listen to just me. If I had detected this a year earlier, I could've screwed up the Democratic State House gerrymander, since the revised numbers place one district over the allowable population limits. But it was too late by then...

[CheeseWhiz]

I think the number of votes in Loving county Tex. is greater than the population; that certaintly does not make sense.

I've been wondering about Loving.  From what I know (seeing as it almost always turns up on Dave's lists of "top five counties with least votes"), it looks to be a Republican stronghold.  They could move like 20 Democrats from Wyoming and the county would switch.

But then you'd get rid of the entire Wyoming Democratic base, not to mention the dent it would put into the population itself!

[muon2]

The unfixable one is, I am convinced, a case where the Census Bureau screwed up their geocoding and plunked an apartment complex's population in the wrong precinct*, thus resulting in way too many voters for the precinct's population. But the Census Bureau is highly hostile to suggestions for correcting their data, and my old supervisors don't care about accuracy that much - yes, they're Democrats - so that one remains wrong.

It is a slow and tedious process to fix Census results. As part of a special census last year two errors were discovered. It took three months to correct the base population due to an annexation overlooked by the Census. It took eight months to correct an error by Census enumerators that placed one apartment building out of twelve in a complex outside the city limits. And even though the Census acknowledged their error, the city had to pay a few thousand dollars to make the correction.

[WMS]

The unfixable one is, I am convinced, a case where the Census Bureau screwed up their geocoding and plunked an apartment complex's population in the wrong precinct*, thus resulting in way too many voters for the precinct's population. But the Census Bureau is highly hostile to suggestions for correcting their data, and my old supervisors don't care about accuracy that much - yes, they're Democrats - so that one remains wrong.

It is a slow and tedious process to fix Census results. As part of a special census last year two errors were discovered. It took three months to correct the base population due to an annexation overlooked by the Census. It took eight months to correct an error by Census enumerators that placed one apartment building out of twelve in a complex outside the city limits. And even though the Census acknowledged their error, the city had to pay a few thousand dollars to make the correction.

I see you've had the distinct 'pleasure' of dealing with them as well.