The Texas Zero Vote Counts - An Explanation

The TX vote counts seem to be correct in most counties because not all counties in TX hold primary elections for both political parties.

(So we can trust the Texas primary results as much as we can trust the accuracy of any State's vote counts which are not subjected to post-election manual independent audits, and lack publicly verifiable ballot reconciliation and security procedures.)

There is, however, an interesting pattern in the Texas Democratic primary which is open to voters of both political parties in Texas.

In the 21 counties where there was no Republican primary, the vote shares for Clinton and Obama were:

Clinton 69.4%

Obama 24.6%

as opposed to Clinton and Obama vote shares in the other counties which had both Republican and Democratic primaries:

Clinton 49.7%

Obama 48.7%

This is a huge margin swing of 43.8%!

This leads one to suspect that Republican cross-over voters "may" have had a large hand in determining the Democratic nominee in Texas.

The only way to know for sure would be to go through the poll books to see how many registered Republicans voted in the Democratic primary election.

The practice of voting in the opposing party's primary is legal and would be what strategic voters would do if there were an open primary, especially if there were no primary in one's own political party, or the primary in one's own political party were not competitive. I.e. Because McCain was expected to win the Republican primary, it would be expected that many Republicans would cross over to the Democratic primary and vote for the candidate whom they felt had the least chance of winning in the opposing party's primary election.

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Thanks to Rady Ananda for writing this article on the phenomenon of the lack of primary elections in some counties:

Texas Holdem: Provisionals, Delegates, One-Party Counties Hold Back the Public Will http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rady_ana_080307_texas_holdem_3a_provis.htm

Ananda quotes Texas attorney David Rogers. "With no county chairman, there is no one to organize or run a primary." Rogers explained that while ballots, voting machines, and election workers are all paid for by the state government, the local parties at the county level have to bear the costs of administration and accounting; and they have to find someone to do the paperwork, and somewhere to store the paper. "The costs in time and money to the parties aren't much, but they aren't nothing."

Ananda quotes Populist Texas attorney, David Van Os: "Armstong, Hansford, and Roberts are the 3 counties in Texas that as of now don't have Democratic county chairs. They are all in the upper Panhandle. So they didn't have Democratic primaries because there was nobody to hold one. In general elections the Democratic vote typically ranges from about 12% to about 22% in those counties.... There is an even greater number of rural West Texas and rural South Texas counties that don't have Republican county chairs, with some of them being Democratic ... and others being Republican counties in national and statewide elections."

Here's a list of GOP county chairs, so you can see that of the 21 counties not holding Republican primaries, 18 of them do not have any Republican party chairs. http://www.texasgop.org/site/PageServer?pagename=leadership_cc

Thanks to Charlie Strauss and a person from Texas for alerting me to this CBS News article.

The following article appeared a couple of days prior to the primaries: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/01/politics/main3895907.shtml

Excerpt: ---------------------------------- "But as Tuesday's primary and caucus nears, with a decision on the Democratic nominee hanging in the balance, 21 Texas counties won't even be holding primaries.

Despite Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama barnstorming the state, three rural Panhandle counties will net them zero votes.

The Democrats aren't holding a primary in the sparsely-populated counties because there's no one to run an election there.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/01/politics/main3895907.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3895907

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Because Texas has both a primary and a caucus, it may be possible to have a caucus but not a primary election in a county.

If only registered Democrats attend the Democratic caucuses, this could possibly explain why Obama won the Texas Democratic caucuses, but lost the Democratic open primary election; and could possibly also explain why the number of voters in the Republican primaries were less than half the number in the Democratic primary. However, again, it would take examining the poll books and adding up the number of registered Republicans and Democrats who voted in each county. A large job.

Texas is an unusual state in that the party primaries are not conducted state-wide.

Please accept my apologies for my earlier emails. I should have investigated the possible causes of the seemingly anomalous zero votes in 21 Republican and 3 Democratic primaries, prior to sending the earlier emails.

The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author Kathy Dopp's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in exit poll discrepancy analysis.

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