Why is that?....the provisionals i mean
sorry....the spoiled ballots, why are they not figured in?
Why will the provisional ballots increase Bush's lead? Because the table on the Ohio Secretary of State's website shows that these ballots are distributed proportionally to the population of each county. If you consider the provisional ballots cast in a particular county, you would expect that the percent cast for Bush and Kerry to fall in line within a few percentage points to how the regular ballots were cast in that county. Since we know that in the aggregate Bush received more votes than Kerry from the regular ballots, when you aggregrate the results of the provisional ballots from each county, the net result should be a slight gain for Bush. In other words, the provisional ballots should roughly follow the results of the regular ballots cast. The only way I would have expected a different outcome is if the provisional ballots had been cast overwhelmingly in the Democratic strongholds. Thankfully, they were not.