I have come across a rather significant error in the certified “Total Votes Reported by County for 2004 General Election President and Vice President” as published by the Mississippi Secretary of State. The data reported from Lowndes County has Bush with 1,369 votes, Kerry with 10,408, and other candidates with 170 votes for a total of 11,947 votes cast. These data suggest that Kerry won Lowndes County with 87% of the vote – a margin of 9,039 votes. A quick look as past results for Lowndes County shows that no Democrat has won the county since 1956 (George Wallace won as an Independent in 1968). In addition, no Democratic Candidate has won more than 40% of the vote in Lowndes County since 1946. Also looking at the total votes cast, the 11,947 votes is 7,283 fewer than cast in 2000 (a drop of 38%).

This data discrepancy is explained by an error in the tallying of the votes. The trailing zero was dropped from the county total for Bush. Instead of 1,369 votes, Bush actually received 13,690 votes. This figures is confirmed by adding the precinct results from the Official Recapitulation sheet for Lowndes County. I have contacted the Mississippi Secretary of State about this error and have corrected the figure in the data tabulation on this site.