Reply #45: 78% is actually pretty high nationally [View All]

[MrUnderhill]

It probably dropped off because of the high number of first time voters. A higher percentage of which probably didn't understand how to vote.

It could also be the number of voters who hadn't voted in years. They may not have understood that they need to re-register if they haven't voted in a certain number of years (8?) and thought they were still registered.

I'm not going to make an assumption on the partisan breakdown of rejected ballots because:

1) We've been burned on these assumptions before - most recently the assumption that the VALID provisionals would break heavily toward Kerry and,

2) Many of these assumptions always seem to me to rest on the notion that minorities are "stupider" than the rest of us and therefore are more likely to do it wrong. I have a problem with that.

That having been said... a couple counties with HIGHER rejection rates (Cuyahoga) WERE heavy Kerry counties, so even a breakdown along the lines of each county's ballots would give Kerry a couple thousand extra votes.