A week after President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, questions continue to arise around polling results in swing states that don't quite add up. In the key swing state of Ohio, where President Obama's 103,481 vote margin gave him 18 electoral college votes, several instances of unusual results have been reported.
In Wood County, where President Obama defeated Romney by a 31,596 to 28,996 margin, a total of 106,258 voters were registered. Comically, the online edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed that recent census data reports only 98,213 residents of Wood County are eligible to vote, but no mention of the discrepancy was made before the election.
Fueling frustration among conservatives is the report that in 12 wards of Cuyahoga County (home to the city of Cleveland), Governor Romney received zero votes. In Cleveland's 02-Q District, for instance, Obama received 542 votes to zero for Romney.
On election day, Breitbart News and other media outlets reported that two election judges were removed by order of the Director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections after Republican poll observers reported that unregistered voters were allowed to cast ballots.
In the swing state of Colorado, where President Obama defeated Romney by a 51% to 46% margin, President Obama won Gilpin County by a vote of 1,854 to 1,320. The county has a population of 5,411 citizens (4,494 of whom are over the age of 18), but 4,909 registered voters, 415 more people than are eligible to vote.
In Pennsylvania, where Obama won by a 52% to 47% margin, Romney received zero votes in 59 voting divisions within the city of Philadelphia. Those wards accounted for 3.5% of the city's election day turnout. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
Still, 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...
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.Breitbart News reported on Sunday that an additional 333,908 votes cast for Governor Romney in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire would have delivered him to a 270 to 268 victory in the electoral college.
"Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That's worth looking into," he said.
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