OK. I'm looking at the figures on FL vote counts as posted by Kathy Dopp at
http://www.ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
She put these figures together from the 98.6% reporting point and did some simple analysis to try and show some strange differences between touch screen and scanned voting machines (as has been well reported). So far so good, but I've been looking at the numbers and there are some more strange trends that I just don't understand - I'm not claiming a nefarious plot, but it doesn't make sense to me.
BTW, you can follow along by opening the htm document in excel, it'll work just fine. It presents a simple expected number of votes for B and K based on percent party registration and actual votes cast. Then it computes a factor of surprise, indicating how many more or fewer votes than expected were cast for each candidate - e.g. 50% suprise means half again as many votes were cast in favor of X than expected, -50% surprise means half the expected vote was cast. I haven't done an analysis of how the unenrolled voters played and I'm certainly no statistician (but maybe some of you are)...
First, if you plot actual votes cast in each district vs Kerry "suprise", you'll see very clearly that smaller district = unexpectedly fewer votes than partisanship would predict, apparently without regard to REP/DEM balance in the district. In fact, no county with fewer than 38000 votes cast had more Kerry votes than expected with that group turning out around 50% fewer blue votes than expected, on average.
Then I compared percent registered Dem percentage against Kerry surprise, and I'm baffled by the result. It shows that more democrats = fewer votes for K and fewer democrats = more votes for K.
I'm just confused by this - it appears that small counties just plain ignored party affiliation and that presence of democrats was inversely proportional to votes for Kerry. Also, it turns out that the lower the percentage of independants, the better it went for bush regardless of party balance!
For good measure, it is also obvious that the most surprising bush wins/kerry losses used optical scanners rather than touch screens.