This is a diary to follow up on a comment I made yesterday on this diary by carldavidson. Something just didn’t sit well with me after I made the comment so I started thinking about it a little more.
I’ll start this by noting that I know very little about Beaver County, PA, even though I’m from the same sate. All I know is that it’s somewhere between Pittsburgh and the Ohio border. What fascinated me about the area was the diary from yesterday with the stories about people stopping by the Obama table and discussing their thoughts. It also fascinated me that the author noted that the county is 2 to 1 in favor or registered Democrats. That seemed odd since Kerry won the county by less than 3%, but I checked the county website and the current registration is 68,681 Democrat and 35,388 Rebulican.
So after more thinking about this, I decided to look into it a little more. Below is a more detailed table of the Presidential results in Beaver County since 1976.
Year Candidate Votes Percent
1976 Carter 46,117 56.8%
1976 Ford 33,593 41.4%
1980 Carter 43,995 55.1%
1980 Reagan 30,496 38.2%
1984 Mondale 54,765 62.9%
1984 Reagan 32,052 36.8%
1988 Dukakis 50,327 65.8%
1988 Bush 25,764 33.7%
1992 Clinton 44,877 54.5%
1992 Bush 21,361 25.9%
1996 Clinton 39,578 53.3%
1996 Dole 26,048 35.1%
2000 Gore 38,925 52.9%
2000 Bush 32,491 44.1%
2004 Kerry 42,146 51.1%
2004 Bush 39,916 48.4%
Now, maybe some people’s definition of a Reagan Democrat differs from mine, but the cause of the narrowing margin of victories for democrats in Beaver County, PA does not seem to be Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan got beaten here by 17 and 26 points, and worse than that, Bush the first got clobbered by 30 points twice.
So it seems to me, something else is going on here. I don’t have any good data on demographic changes. I’m hoping someone else might. But even demographic changes couldn’t possibly explain a 30 point swing in national elections in 12 years unless the entire county was wiped out by a wayward comet and a new civilization took its place.
Other plausible explanations might be "Clinton Fatigue", but then Hillary Clinton just received more than 28,000 votes in the primary and beat Obama by almost 40 points. Maybe it was something about Teresa Heinz Kerry that Beaver County folks didn’t like since she and her late husband’s company is local. This isn’t too likely since her husband won more than 60% of Beaver County the last time he ran for the US Senate.
Ok, so now I’m back to what is really going on in this county that has historically voted well above the national average for Democratic candidates for President, yet has dramatically reversed that trend since 2000. The internet is a wonderful creation.
It turns out that in 1998 three counties in Pennsylvania decided to use the electronic UniLect Patriot Voting System. Those counties were Beaver, Mercer and Greene. There just happens to be a pile of information on the problems these three counties experienced during the 2004 election. The data can be found here, here, here and here. Then there is the State of Pennsylvania on the decommissioning of the Patriot Voting System, here.
The last link is very disturbing as it goes into detail all of the failures of the system as well as how easy it would be for someone local to manipulate the results. I don’t want to go so far as to accuse anyone of anything, but the results for Beaver County do look a little suspicious. The results for Greene and Mercer Counties aren’t any better. Both counties voted for the Democratic candidate for President (with the exception of Mercer in 1980) until the magical year of 2004 when both counties were suspiciously won by George W. Bush.
The "good" news is that the Patriot Voting System is no longer used in Beaver County, PA. The bad news is that it was replaced by the ES&S electronic voting system. There is actually a link to a demo on how to use it on the Beaver County website. It took about 3 seconds of a web search, however, to find this article on how poor the security is on the ES&S system. I’m hopeful, however, that the normal voting patterns in Beaver County will return this year. In 2006, Bob Casey won the county in the Senate race with 62% of the vote. Casey also won Mercer and Greene Counties by substantial margins.
So if you are following along, national election Democrats won by substantial margins until the Patriot Voting System was used. At that point the margins for Democrats became unusually small. The Patriots were then removed and the first national election Democrat goes back to winning by substantial margins.
Maybe I’m crazy and this is all a coincidence. It would be very interesting to see where else these systems are used. At one point 30 counties across the US had them in place. It's also going to be fun to watch the results come in from Beaver County, PA this November.