Big City Vote Counting

Obama's "Lost" Votes No Surprise

Obama got a respectable 40% of the votes in New York. Were there more?
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"If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud." Michael Bloomberg, Mayor, New York City, commenting on 80 election districts with zero votes for Obama.

Michael Collins
"Scoop" Independent News
Washington, DC

"... a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city's 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district."

Sam Roberts, New York Times Feb. 16, 2008

The reports of voting problems in New York City should come as no surprise. Anyone who has examined the diminished state of urban elections administration and reporting in the modern political era knows that the urban centers have shoddy voting equipment, curious results rarely questioned or investigated, and lackluster administration.

In 2004, a stunning event occurred, one so stunning it was never reported by the mainstream media. According to the media consortium's national exit poll, President George W. Bush won the election through a huge increase in his "big city" votes (big cities are defined as 500,000 or greater population). (See Election 2004: The Urban Legend and Notes from the Underground: Why the 2004 Election Matters More than Ever).

Let's take a look at the questions about results in New York and the other big cities in the 2004 election and how those questions were apparent to the mainstream media but deliberately ignored. This will provide an obvious clue about what's behind the 80 election districts absent Obama votes and other urban election "irregularities" as they show up around the country in 2008.

Haven't You Heard, Bush Won 2004 in the Big Cities?

According to the final 2004 exit poll from the media consortium (AP, CNN, and the four major networks), there was a 66% increase in big city turnout compared to a 16% average increase nationwide. Bush made huge vote gains compared to the 2000 exit poll. He didn't win any big cities, but without these gains he would have lost the election. His share of big city minority votes was similar to what it had been in 2000: Minorities showed a strong loyalty to the Democrats. But how about that 80% increase in turnout for big city white voters? Right away we know that there's something wrong with the exit poll.

The exit polls showed that Bush increased his vote share in big cities by 53% over his 2000 performance. He also racked up a healthy gain in the smaller cities (50,000 to 500,000), breaking even with Kerry, where Gore had whipped him 57% to 40% in that category in 2000.

Charles Cook led the upper tier analysts by proclaiming that Bush and Rove ran "the best planned, best executed presidential campaign ever." Cook was dead wrong when he asserted that the Republican gains in big cities came through defections from traditional Democratic voters - blacks, Latinos, and Jewish voters. That simply didn't happen.

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