And then, just for kicks, they decided to run a statistical analysis by race. And viola, they discovered that an incredibly disproportionate number of Georgia voters in majority black precincts didn’t record a vote for the second-highest office in the state. They found the anomaly was incredibly high in precincts where there were high percentages of black registered voters.
And here is the troubling part: According to the report from Coalition for Good Governance (CGG) and the experts who spoke with The Root, the undervote wasn’t concentrated in Democratic areas. It seemed to specifically happen in black neighborhoods. Even stranger, the black voters’ absentee mail ballots didn’t reflect the drop-off, only the people who voted on election day and people who voted on machines in early voting.
The CGG’s report notes:
The extreme undervote issue occurred at statistically significant levels in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties. However, the undervotes on voting machines are concentrated in precincts where African American voters make up the majority of the precincts’ registered voters. The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican. The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.
The Root was given exclusive access to the analyzed data from the 2018 Georgia elections as well as the analyses conducted by some of the top experts in the area. We spoke to the researchers and none of them has a logical explanation for the statistical anomaly.
The statistics professor from Berkeley can’t explain it. The voting-machine expert at the University of Michigan doesn’t know how it happened. The data analyst from one of the leading analytics firm in the world has no answers. The political expert who specializes in black voters can’t explain it.
Either all the black people in Georgia collectively decided to skip a vote on their ballot or something happened with the voting machines. But only the machines where black people voted.
