The Popular Vote: Obama or Hillary?

Back to that question of who has more of the popular vote, Obama or Hillary: Realclearpolitics, has the following table:

Popular Vote

The top heading "Popular Vote Total" is the popular vote excluding Michigan. The third and fourth lines include Michigan, unmodified. The fifth and sixth lines include Michigan, but with 100% of the Uncommitted vote going to Obama.

The second, fourth, and sixth lines include estimates of the popular votes in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington.

But as Talkleft points out, there is still another wrinkle to the definition of "popular vote": states which have both caucuses and primaries, where the caucus determines who gets the delegates, but the primary has more voters expressing a preference for a candidate. Nebraska, Idaho, and Washington both had primaries as well as caucuses. It seems reasonable to include them if we are measuring popular votes cast either literally or to see which candidate has more support among voters.

Including them helps Hillary and hurts Obama. I use numbers from Talkleft.

Nebraska had a primary in May, as well as its earlier caucuses which actually chose the delegates (see here for a news story).

Nebraska had 38 thousand caucus votes and 95 thousand votes in its May primary. In the caucuses, Obama beat Hillary 68% to 32%, 26 to 12 thousand, a 14 thousand margin. In the primary, Obama beat Hillary 49.4% to 46.6%, 47 to 44, a 3 thousand margin. Replacing caucus with primary results adds 11 thousand to Hillary's total popular vote.

Washington had 238 thousand caucus votes and 691 thousand votes in its February primary (on which, see here). In the caucuses, Obama beat Hillary 67% to 31%, 159 to 74 thousand, an 85 thousand margin. In the primary, Obama beat Hillary 51% to 45%, 352 to 311 thousand, a 41 thousand margin. Replacing caucus with primary results adds 44 thousand to Hillary's total popular vote.

In Idaho, Obama had a 13 thousand vote lead in the caucuses, but only 8 thousand in the primary. Replacing the Washington and Nebraska and Idaho caucus results with primary results thus helps Hillary by 60 thousand votes. The spreads in RealClearPolitics's 6 categories change to Clinton +36 thousand
Obama +74
Clinton +363
Clinton +2538
Clinton +125
Clinton +16

Thus, the only definition of these, once Nebraska and Washington popular votes are included, by which Obama wins is if we exclude the Michigan primary and include estimates from the 4 caucus states.

Of course, all of these vote totals are very close, as are the delegate totals. Their main importance in my opinion is as a gauge of how much each candidate appeals to voters, and really we should weight the later primaries more heavily in measuring that. For someone who believes in "count every vote", though, the popular vote is crucial, more important perhaps than the vote allocated by the rules.

Speaking of the rules, the Democratic National Committee ruling today puzzles me. It seems blatantly illegal. The DNC has said that delegates from Michigan and Florida will only get 1/2 vote each. That's fine--- those states broke the rules. But it is also allocating the Uncommitted vote in Michigan to Obama, giving him the delegates based on that. Since the voters voted for Uncommitted, not Obama, how can those delegates possibly be committed to vote for Obama? The same result could have been achieved by picking allowing the Obama camp to pick the delegates but leaving them formally uncommitted, but why wasn't that done? Or *is* that how it was done?

Hilary Clinton Is Winning the Popular Vote

Michael Barone has good posts here and post-Penn about Clinton's popular vote chances. But I think he does it wrong.

Since the popular vote competition is informal, each side will pick its own rules. Mrs. Clinton has said that MIchigan and Florida should count. Florida gives her 288 thousand and Michigan gives her a 90 thousand margin over Uncommitted, though she will point out that it gives her 328 thousand more people than voted for Obama, who wasn't on the ballot. That's 616 thousand from those two states,using Clinton-supporter math.

RealClearPolitics gave Obama a lead of 827 thousand before Pennsylvania. Subtract the 106 thousand that's just attributed to Obama from caucus states but are not actual votes, to get 721 thousand. Subtract Florida and Michigan to get 105 thousand. Now subtract Clinton's 205 thousand margin from Pennsylvania, and she's ahead nationally by 100,000 votes. She doesn't need Porto Rico any more to claim victory.

Which rules to use is debatable. It being debatable is a good argument for judging winners by pre-set rules rather than ex post judgements. Many Democrats prefer ex post judgements, both as a matter of political style (that applies to judicial decisionmaking too) and because they argued for it in the Gore-Florida situation in 2000. Furthermore, in that election they argued for the most expansive rules possible, to count the most people who came to the polls and tried to vote (though as I recall-- I might be wrong-- nobody realized at the time that if the Democrat definition had been adopted, Bush would have won). Here, a primitive one-man one-vote theory would say that Clinton is ahead, because Obama really didn't get any votes in Michigan. To get round that, you'd have to resort to a theory that what should count is who people would have voted for if their candidate had been on the ballot, and that is perilously close to a theory of how people would have voted if Obama had been as much the favorite in January as he is now.

I think these popular-vote calculations shouldn't matter and it would be fine for the superdelegates to ignore them. But then I thought it was fine to follow the pre-set rules in Florida 2000 too. The Democrats think differently, so they have a big problem-- and it is a problem not unrelated to their political philosophy, so we shouldn't feel it's unfair that they have it.

Election Fraud and Fired US Attorney John McKay

I have read people saying that election fraud has trivial importance in the United States, so the Republicans' desire for investigations and for identity to be verified for voting is unjustified. Here's clear evidence against that. Note, too, the behavior of US Attorney John McKay, who was later fired.Click here to read more

It was right to fire him for that.

But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the- vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state.

The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake. ...

In Washington state, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said that in lieu of charging Acorn itself as part of the registration fraud case, he had worked out an agreement by which the group will pay $25,000 to reimburse the costs of the investigation and formally agree to tighten supervision of its activities, which Mr. Satterberg said were rife with "lax oversight."...

Take Washington state, where former U.S. attorney John McKay declined to pursue allegations of voter fraud after that state's hotly contested 2004 governor's race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 133 votes on a third recount. As the Seattle media widely reported, some "voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage lockers, and still others were ineligible felons. Extra ballots were "found" and declared valid 10 times during the vote count and recount. In some precincts, more votes were cast than voters showed up at the polls.

Mr. McKay insists he left "no stone unturned" in investigating allegations of fraud in the governor's race but found no evidence of a crime. But in an interview with Stefan Sharkansky of SoundPolitics.com in May, Mr. McKay admitted that he "didn't like the way the election was handled" and that it had "smelled really, really bad." His decision not to prosecute was apparently based on the threshold of evidence he insisted be met before he would even deploy FBI agents to investigate: a firsthand account of a conspiracy to alter the outcome of the election.

But Mr. McKay is incorrect in saying that he had to find a conspiracy in order to reach the federal threshold for election crimes. In Milwaukee, after the 2004 election U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic investigated many of the same problems that were found in Seattle: felons voting, double-voting and more votes cast than voters who signed poll books. In 2005 Mr. Biskupic concluded that he had found nothing that "has shown a plot to try to tip an election," but he nonetheless prosecuted and won six convictions for felon voting and double-voting.

 

Note that the federal law apparently doesn't make it a crime to use fraud to change the result of an election---it only makes it a crime to use fraud to change the result of an election *because you want your side to win*. If you do it for money, that doesn't count. Or so the US attorneys interpret the law.