The vote totals in Florida

I read something this morning that mentioned that Florida had an unusual election outcome. The article pointed out that it was "convenient" that the law in Florida was changed in the last several years so that the only person who could call for a recount is the states attorney general, a person who had close ties to trump.

And they pointed that there appears to be some amount of voting irregularity. And here's the thing: they're right.

According to the official totals from the Florida department of elections:
Floridas official turnout was 9,580,489
Votes cast for president were 9,420,039
Votes cast for senate seat were 9,301,820

What gives?

On the surface, what this means is that 160,000 people turned out to vote but did NOT fill in the line for president. In a hotly contested election for president, that does not make sense, does it? I get a ballot, in person or by mail, and I leave the president line blank?

Logically, I would imagine that you could account for some of it because voters didn't mark the ballot properly. And to be fair that's close to 2%, so it's at least possible, statistically speaking. But it still seems unusual.

You could make the case that perhaps they showed up for the down ballot races, but I think you can throw that idea out. The first down ballot item was the senate seat, and its vote total was below the president. I had heard it suggested that medical marijuana drew in the difference. There were about 9.1 million people who voted on that ballot question.

Certainly there could be some confounding: some people may have voted for just the marijuana item, while others may have voted just for president. There is some downloadable data available from the state, so it may be worth a look...but my first glance at it suggests it may not be useful for such an analysis.

So to me, it still seems like something is amiss.

Let's look at this another way. Hillary lost by about 113,000 votes. The number of votes cast for president was about 120,000 more than were cast for the senate. Of course, it's very likely that some voters only showed up to vote for the top of the ticket, so it can be easily explained.

But it is interesting that the top of the ticket won by almost that difference. Of course that could be a coincidence, too. But you get the idea. It is just unusual enough to warrant more discussion than it ever got.