Reply #35: Where Bush's New Voters Were....

[althecat]

For raw numbers see...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=19390

Here's the short version.

1. Bush did not pick up any vote at all on the West Coast.. in fact he lost ground in both Washington and California. This is interesting as this is arguably where the BBV machine manufacturers have been receiving the most heat. However it could reflect a relative lack of interest in so-called "moral issues" out west.

2. The five states I picked on the basis that they are known to have lots of voting machines (and particularly Diebold machines) had a significantly higher percentage increase in bush voters than average… 25% compared to 17% nationally.

3. Likewise the swing states also had a higher average rate of new bush voters at 21%. This however might be expected as they also had much more active campaigns.

4. Among the 31 states I examined were three big democratic states NY, NJ and IL. I selected them on a hunch because a) they are unlikely to be suspected of being used in a vote rigging exercise, but b) necessary to include if you want to achieve a large across the board popular vote gain that does not look too suspicious. These three states averaged a 21% vote gains for Bush and NJ and NY achieved around 25%. However between them they contributed 1.7 million new bush votes, or nearly 20% of Bush's total vote gain.

5. The remainder of my selection of states is broadly defined as "red states", they averaged 20% in terms of voting gain for bush. Notably both Kansas and Utah achieved % gains for bush below the national average. I am guessing here but I would have thought both states were "moral issue" based voter heavy.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE VOTES

6. In sheer numeric terms Bush gained far and away the most votes in Texas and Florida, 900k and 700k respectively.

7. 60% of all Bushes new votes, 5.2 million votes, were gained in just 11 states…FL, TX. NY, OH, PA, GA, MI, NJ, TN, NC, IL

8. Add in another 8 states and you get to 82% of all bush's new votes or 7.1 million… the states are WI MN IND AL OK KY AZ LOU & MD

9. Put another way 7.1 million votes or 82% of bushes gain was achieved in states totalling 65% of the popular vote. Within these states he achieved an average vote gain of an astonishing 23%.

10. 92% of the vote gain is found in the 31 states I selected data for.

11. The rate of bush vote growth in the remaining 20 states was just 5% on average.

12. In percentage terms Florida and Georgia (both heavily Diebold equipment using states) were the standouts with 32% gains respectively.

13. In percentage terms five other states showed more than 25% growth in the bush vote, in ascending order they were Arizona, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Of these AZ, NM and OK both recently upgraded their machines to new tech machines. NJ and TN also both use computerised voting machines, albeit older models.