Miriam Hill, Andrew Seidman, and John Duchneskie
Philadelphia Inquirer
11/12/2012
…was there not one contrarian voter in those 59 divisions, where unofficial vote tallies have President Obama outscoring Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0?
The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence.
Upon hearing the numbers, Steve Miskin, a spokesman for Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, brought up his party’s voter-identification initiative – which was held off for this election – and said, “We believe we need to continue ensuring the integrity of the ballot.”
The absence of a voter-ID law, however, would not stop anyone from voting for a Republican candidate.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has studied African American precincts, said he had occasionally seen 100 percent of the vote go for the Democratic candidate. Chicago and Atlanta each had precincts that registered no votes for Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008.
“I’d be surprised if there weren’t a handful of precincts that didn’t cast a vote for Romney,” he said. But the number of zero precincts in Philadelphia deserves examination, Sabato added.
“Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That’s worth looking into,” he said.
In a city with 1,687 of the ward subsets known as divisions, each with hundreds of voters, 59 is about 3.5 percent of the total…
The complete article is at the Inquirer.
And, in Ohio:
A larger view of this graphic is here.
Read more at Weasel Zippers.
Update: “We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic.”
“It’s kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia.”
