What Happened in Ohio County, Indiana?

I’m a fan of Dave Leip’s website which storehouses U.S. election results. I was curious to see what county in the country was the best for the Libertarian Party ticket.

On Leip’s site, it said that was Ohio County, Indiana where Jo Jorgensen got more than 11.48% of the vote.

I think that’s a mistake.

No this won’t change the election. But I think someone goofed.

The fault isn’t Leip’s. I checked with the Indiana Elections Division website and he’s presenting the same data they are. Instead, I think someone messed up the numbers.

That result is so much of an outlier that it makes me question the data. The votes for the Libertarian ticket in Ohio County was five or six times what one world expect.

Some commenters on Twitter pointed to the strong showing for the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, Donald Rainwater. That’s true, but he actually trailed his statewide percentage in Ohio County. The Libertarian candidate for Congress got 2.2% which is about what you’d expect.

Maybe the Libertarian really focused on this county in southern Indiana. I don’t know. It does seem odd that Jorgensen got 353 votes while Rainwater got 335 votes. Those are numbers easy to confuse.

Being an investor, you spend a lot of time trying to find numbers that don’t make sense. Perhaps there’s an easy explanation. Many times, there is one. Still, I can’t help noticing that if you took 300 votes from Jorgensen and gave them to Trump, the numbers suddenly fall back into expectations.

I don’t know what happened, but that sure would explain a lot.

Posted by on December 2nd, 2020 at 4:41 pm


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