Two Counties, Two Countries

Thanks to the willingness of the Humboldt County Elections Office to allow citizens to inspect all cast ballots, along with the hard work of the Election Transparency Project's volunteer scanners, we have a complete set of ballot images from November's election.

This allows the Election Transparency Project to do its own count, to make sure there are no problems with the official count.

But it also allows us to analyze the voting behavior of the county's citizens by the presidential candidate they voted for, since we can sort the ballot images into virtual stacks for each candidate.

It's like having a microscope into voting behavior. For example, the proposition that would have repealed the death penalty in California squeaked out a victory in Humboldt, 51/49.  But after dividing the ballots based on which Presidential candidate the voter selected, we see that only 1 in 6 Trump voters were for repeal, while 2/3 of Clinton voters were for repeal, 3/4 of Stein voters, and more than a third of Johnson voters.

The height of each colored bar reflects the percentage of ballots for each candidate; the width of the colored bar represents the proportion of that candidate's voters who voted yes on the proposition.

Check out the results on the first dozen state propositions by clicking here.

What were they thinking?

I've been slowly watching all the ballot images from November's election, at one per second, when I have a chance.  This was a small enough election that I can do this on my own to get a manual count to compare with both TEVS and Hart... I'm through 3800 of our 14000 ballots. 

Everyone needs a hobby, right?

Here's another not-very-easy-to-capture ballot from November's election.  TEVS missed all four votes on this ballot.  I'd bet Hart caught them, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Was the voter expressing a lack of enthusiasm, or was it a lack of #2 pencils?