Did John Kerry Almost Steal the Election?

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC found this interesting fact, there were more votes in the heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County than there were voters.

In his recent column, he states:

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.

Oops.

Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Vote early! Vote often!


This is very curious, and disturbing. A visit to the state's election website shows that John Kerry won that county by a fairly large margin:

Cuyahoga
Kerry -- 433,262 (66.41%)
Bush -- 215,624 (33.05%)
Badnarik -- 1,828 (0.28%)
Peroutka -- 1,667 (0.26%)
Precincts Reporting: 100.00% 652,381

So Kerry wins by 217,638 votes, by the current offical tally. Not a big deal, right?

Well, that's a little strange as well. In 2000, Al Gore won that area by only 166,000 votes. Clinton, who did a little better there, won the same county by 178,000.

This means that in an area where more people voted than were registered, John Kerry had a 76% increase in votes as compared to Al Gore in 2000. That just doesn't pass the sniff test.

When you look at the actual numbers, it's even worse. As the returns from 2000 show, John Kerry got 91,000+ additional votes than Gore did in 2000.

And there are 93,000 more votes this year than voters?

Man that really doesn't pass the smell test.

There's only one problem. Olbermann is probably wrong.

According to the county board of elections, there are 1,005,807 registered voters in the county. 665,334 of them voted.

According to this blog, Cuyahoga County had 1,010,764 registered voters in 2000, which means voter registration went down.

Yet the sheer number of people went way up. Which means there probably was fraud.

Confused?

Nevermind.

Now voting in Palm Beach County, Florida, is another story.