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Purported election infographic for Cuyahoga County, Ohio

The Tea Party Facebook page posted this Monday night.

Is it accurate that:

  1. There are exactly 900135 registered voters in Cuyahoga County Ohio for the 2012 predidental election
  2. There were 900135 voters that cast votes in the 2012 election
  3. 100% of them cast votes for Obama
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  • 10
    Interestingly (though not surprisingly) the post has been removed from the Tea Party site... Things like this really irritate me.
    – Chad
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 14:37
  • 18
    That's very clever--using the phrase "think people" as a decoy to prevent people from thinking!
    – Rex Kerr
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 20:47
  • This is likely an exaggeration of these claims: politifact.com/ohio/statements/2012/nov/21/chain-email/…
    – Nick T
    Commented Nov 21, 2013 at 19:57

3 Answers 3

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Here are the results of the Nov 6th 2012 election for Cuyahoga county Ohio.. A simple Google search found this.

  • Registered voters 927,996
  • Votes Cast 650,437
  • Votes for Barack Obama 447,273
  • Votes for Mitt Romney 190,660

I apologize in advance for the the language but - why do people think they can get away with spreading this bulls**t?

P.S. I've updated for the official certified results, which were not significantly different from the 'unofficial' results published on the day.

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  • 48
    Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. - Adolf Hitler
    – Brian M. Hunt
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 14:35
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    I think it is just that they want to believe that it was other people dirty dealing that cost them the election instead of the people who would have supported a good candidate not being willing to vote for a puppet that would be no better.
    – Chad
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 14:46
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    @BrianM.Hunt Hitler used the phrase, but the Wikipedia article says that Hitler used it when accusing the Jews of using such a technique.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Dec 10, 2012 at 4:54
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    @AndrewGrimm: It's an interesting point you make. It seems the origin of the quote is as fascinating as it is complex; it is certainly true that both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are associated with the language. It may have more ancient, forgotten lineage - I do not know. In any case there's also "A lie told often enough becomes truth" – Vladimir Lenin.
    – Brian M. Hunt
    Commented Dec 10, 2012 at 23:57
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    Why do people think they can get away with spreading this? The sad part is that they largely do. While thinking people don't believe such nonsense, these memes are targeted at making even more mindlessly zealous supporters out of a base that is already willing to believe the worst about those who disagree with them without any fact-checking at all. From my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, this strategy seems to be working, regardless of how egregious the lies may be. This describes most of the political memes I see from both sides of the aisle.
    – reirab
    Commented Jan 25, 2016 at 19:37
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The graphic attributes the data to "www.floridapoliticalpress.com".

However, the Florida Political Press web-site disavows the graphic and the data in it, as a distortion of their earlier claims:

an unknown individual created an image [...] based on the aforementioned article, distorting the information within and then tagged Florida Political Press as the verifying source of this blatantly false production.

As can be seen, it states that ALL of Cuyahoga County voted for Obama, which IS NOT true and is not stated in the article. I’d guess this is the work of some well meaning individual distraught over the results of last Tuesday’s election, however, this effort distorts the truth, assaults my integrity and hurts the conservative movement because it gives detractors (Far Left) the opportunity to dismiss everything coming from bloggers on the Right. [...]

With an assist from a reader, I was able to track the photo to a FaceBook page titled ‘Let’s Make Fun of Liberals – A Political Stomping Ground‘… ironically, it espouses the virtues of free speech. While the page does not identify who is behind it, I was able to send a message requesting that the image be deleted – thus far, no response.

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    To be fair, the original article does make it sound as if everybody voted for Obama. “exactly how many votes do 15 districts represent? Thousands… tens of thousands? Yet every last one, down to a man in these 21 precincts voted for Barack Obama“
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 11:11
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    so a false flag operation to make some people look really stupid?
    – vsz
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 14:12
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    @vsz that would imply a disturbing level of competence not otherwise exhibited. The simpler explanation is that it is a not very competent tea party zealot trying to blacken the democrats. Outsiders to the USA are often shocked by the extreme partisan nature of US politics and one of the side effects is that some party supporters will believe the most egregious nonsense about their opponents.
    – matt_black
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 17:49
  • The actual "unofficial" results for those precincts can be found at boe.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_boe/en-US/ElectionResults2012/…. There are only 10 with votes for only Obama, and many of them had less than 100 voters total.
    – bwarner
    Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 21:21
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    @matt_black- "Outsiders to the USA are often shocked by the extreme partisan nature of US politics" - are you referring to Koreans or Indians? (to use to random examples of 2 countries I recall seeing a news articles in the last 2 years about physical fights in parlaments) :)
    – user5341
    Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 22:03
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Google is your friend: Official results from the Board of Elections:

REGISTERED VOTERS - TOTAL . . . . . 927,996

Barack Obama/Joe Biden (DEM) . . . . 447,273 Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan (REP) . . . . 190,660

http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_boe/en-US/ElectionResults2012/Nov2012/amended/11062012FinalAmendedofficialResultsbyCategory.HTM

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