We keep hearing that Democratic new voter registrations wildly outnumber Republican registrations.  I wonder how much this might have to do with that:

Two Ohio voters, including Domino’s pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up.

Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15″ times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Maybe that is why when early voting began in Ohio a week ago state elections officials were surprised at the very low turnout in the state’s urban areas.

A weeklong period in which Ohioans could register to vote and immediately cast a ballot ended Monday with turnout that didn’t quite match the expectations of election officials — or the campaign predictions that preceded it.

As of Monday evening with polling sites still open, projections were that about 4,000 to 5,000 voters in the state’s four largest counties would have taken advantage of the policy, which survived multiple court challenges.

Elections officials were surprised by the low turnout.

“With all the hoopla we were anticipating a whole lot more,” said Steve Harsman, the elections director in Montgomery County, home to Dayton.

Overall, between 20,000 and 25,000 people were expected to have voted early in person in the four counties, beginning Sept. 30. The four counties include the state’s largest urban areas — Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton — and the focal points of campaign get-out-the-vote efforts.

Which campaign do you think projected a much higher turnout? 

(More after the jump.)

After the 2000 election I looked at black voter turnout and predicted a problem for Democrats in the future.  Black turnout was up dramatically–especially in targeted swing states.  In Florida, for example, although blacks are only 13% of the population, they accounted for 29% of Al Gore’s votes.  Nationally 90% of the black vote went to the Democratic candidate.  The problem I predicted for Democrats was that they had reached nearly as high as they could possibly go with the black vote.  Only marginal improvements from that level were possible, while the potential downside for Democrats, should they start to lose some portion of the black vote, could be enormous.  The example of 2000 was that Democrats needed to sustain both historically high black turnout and near unanimous support for their candidates just to get to a tie.

In presidential elections from 1968 to 1996 the gap in percentage of black citizens who voted trailed white citizen voting rates by an average of 8.0%, with a range of between a 4.1% gap in 1984 and a 11.1% gap in 1992. 

Looking at the 2000 voter participation results more closely gives us a clue as to why that year was probably the high water mark for black voter participation.  59.7% of black women citizens voted in the election that year, compared with 60.5% of whites, putting the voter participation rates of both groups within the margin of error of being equal.  The big difference was black men, of whom only 53.0% voted.  The difference is likely highly correlated to the much higher rate of felony convictions among black men.

Decreasing the turnout gap, however, hasn’t been sufficient to improve Democrats’ chances.  Counterintuitively, the larger the gap between black and white voting rates, the more likely it was that the Democratic candidate won.  Going back to 1968, the largest gaps were in 1992 (11.1%), 1972 (10.4%) and 1976 (10.4%).  In two of those three years the Democratic candidate won.  The three presidential election years with the smallest gaps all saw Republican victories: 2000 (3.7%), 1984 (4.1%), and 2004 (5.4%).

How could this be?  Simple.  There are more whites than blacks.  From 1996 to 2000 black turnout increased 5.4 points from 51.4% to 56.8%.  During the same period white turnout increased only 3.1 points from 57.4% to 60.5%.  However since the white citizen population is more than seven times larger than the black population, the net result was that in raw numbers new white voter turnout was significantly higher than new black voter turnout.

Could it be racism?  Perhaps.  A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics two years should give Obama supporters reason for concern.  It concluded that black Democrats on the ballot increased both white and black voter turnout by two to three percentage points, but because whites outnumber blacks, it works out to be a net advantage for their Republican opponents. 

However, one point that argues against racism as a cause is that the same study concluded that there was no change in white opposition turnout when the candidate was a black Republican.  It appears that it simply may be that ideology is the cause in increasing turnout of both groups of voters.  A black candidate espousing a liberal Democratic ideology, while he increases black voter turnout also increases white turnout to oppose his ideology, thus benefitting Republicans.

Going back to the Ohio early voting example, we have heard a great deal that black and Democratic voter registration is significantly improved this year.  But how much of that is because people like Mr. Barkley have registered multiple times?  Probably a lot if the Obama campaign and the Democrat Ohio Secretary of State were off in their early voting projections by 400%.  If there are many more people like Mr.  Barkley and they vote only once, urban turnout may be far lower than increased voter registration numbers would indicate.

Were I the Obama campaign I would now be greatly alarmed that my voter registration outreach efforts have given me an illusion of improvement that simply isn’t real.  And were I the McCain campaign I could take comfort in the fact that early returns indicate that Obama supporters aren’t turning out in the numbers I feared, and I could take further comfort in the likelihood that whatever improved voter turnout Obama does have, it will be balanced by my own higher numbers.

The irony is that while Republicans have long been concerned about ACORN voter registration fraud, that fraud’s only practical effect may be to make Democrats overconfident.

MORE:

Glenn Reynolds has a good roundup of reports of more ACORN voter fraud in Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada.

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