August 2nd Primary Precinct Turnout Ranged From 7.46% to 675%: St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners (UPDATED)
NOTE: A response from the Board of Elections is at the bottom.
While the battle over absentee ballots on the 78th House race continuers (see Absentee ballot applications and their envelopes are public record, St. Louis judge rules), I decided to focus on voter turnout at the precinct-level.
Two days after the August 2nd primary I posted about the outcome: A Look at Some of Tuesday’s Primary Results. On the 15th the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners generated at detailed final report based on ward and precinct.
The overall turnout for the city was 28.26%. Of course, some wards have higher turnout than others. The ward-level turnout ranged from a low of 20>2% (25th) to a high of 38.1% (16th) — source. Each of the 28 wards are divided into 6-11 precincts — 222 in total. I entered the turnout from each into a spreadsheet so I could find the precincts with the highest & lowest turnout.The results weren’t what I expected. Remember, overall the citywide turnout was 28.26% and the ward-level range was 20.2-38.1%.
Three precincts had single digit turnout:
- Ward 19, Precinct 2: 9.8% (5 out of 51 registered voters)
- Ward 08, Precinct 6: 8.45% (6 out of 71)
- Ward 09, Precinct 7: 7.46% (5 out of 67)
On the high side there were 9 precincts that were in the 40s, and another 4 at 50% or higher. This is where it got strange:
- Ward 14, Precinct 8: 50% (28 out of 56 registered voters)
- Ward 02, Precinct 6: 78.7% (11 out of 14)
- Ward 01, Precinct 7: 106.42% (116 out of 109)
- Ward 15, Precinct 7: 675%! (27 out of 4)
I emailed St. Louis Board of Elections commissioner Gary Stoff Thursday morning to enquire about these impossibly high numbers. Stoff quickly replied saying they weren’t possible, he’d look into it and get back to me. At this point I’ve not heard back and the results with these numbers are still online, here. I assume at some point they’ll take it down, so I’ve uploaded a copy here (3,144 pages). It’s dated 8/15/16 at 14:36:35. I also uploaded the summary results here.
I don’t know why some precincts have so few registered voters, when many others have over 1,000. Is geography (distance to polling place) keeping some voters away? How can there be more voters than are registered? I hope we find out what happened before November 8th.
— Steve Patterson
The following was received on 8/31/2016 @ 1:52am:
Steve — The reason for the discrepancy in that those precincts were located in polling sites with more than one precinct. The election judges in those precincts checked in the voters who came to their table correctly, but used the wrong encoders (encoders from another precinct in that same polling place) to issue voters a ballot for the touch screen machines. As a result, the numbers are skewed in those precincts. There is no way to correct the mix-up in the database for this past election, but we will make every effort in our next round of poll worker training to impress upon the poll workers the importance of not mixing up encoders.
Thank you for calling this matter to my attention.
Gary
Usually, we are instructed not to be concerned about over-100% turnout, because racism and voter oppression and Jim Crow.
The reason why precincts have such different populations (and the reason why we have precincts in the first place) is due to how different jurisdictions overlap.
In the simplest case, look at aldermanic wards and state house districts. There is not a perfect overlap. One ward could be in 3 different house districts — hence you’d have at least 3 precincts in that ward. If two house districts make up only tiny portions of the ward and the third district makes up the rest, you’d have two precincts with small populations with the third having a much larger population.
Now add in state senate districts, community college districts, etc… and you can see why there are many precincts in some wards.
I’ve updated this post with a response from the Board of Elections.