For some time, individuals have claimed that vote fraud must exist because there were 49 precincts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in November 2012, which reported zero votes for Mitt Romney. Now two political scientists, Richard Pildes and Stephen Ansolabehere, have done research into whether there were any precincts in the same election who reported zero votes for President Obama. They found 38 such precincts, and they excluded all precincts with fewer than 20 votes cast. They also believe there are some more they could have found, but data was not available. See their post at the election law blog here.
It doesn’t surprise me that there are election precincts where a major party candidate got zero votes in 2012. I don’t know the size of a typical precinct in Pennsylvania. But I know that in New York the smallest geographic political areas for which aggregated enrollment figures and votes are grouped are known as districts. There can be fewer than five voters in a district, and districts are often very partisan. So, this kind of news doesn’t shock me.
While it seems plausible to me that there could be such precincts in which one of the major candidates received no votes, it’s not much of a response to the claim that 49 precincts in one city had no votes for Romney, to say that 38 precincts in the entire country had no votes for Obama.
Richard Pildes appears to be a law professor rather than a political scientist.
His blog post is quite disingenuous, but that is to be expected from a lawyer. He brags that they excluded precincts with fewer than 20 voters, but a precinct with 20 voters is quite rural. He then goes on to say that the Philadelphia precincts where Romney or McCain received zero votes averaged 338 votes.
Perhaps Pildes could ask his colleague Stephen Ansolabehere to calculate the average of the Zero Obama precincts. Since he is at Harvard, he may be able to borrow a computer at MIT.
I always thought that the very low voter precincts would be the easiest way to not only determine election fraud, but also you could put paid to the lie in certain states with open primaries you could prove people vote in one primary but not for that party in the general election.
Joshua K,
Come to North Philly and I have friends who can “enlighten” you.