Look into this link.
http://www.federalreview.com/fedrevdata.htmThere are states where the candidate has “too many” votes.
To Bush it accumulates to 144 EV (see first column), while Kerry’s number is 81 (See rightmost column). Bush would have been very happy if he could move 20,000 Rep voters from IN to OH in exchange for 20,000 Dems who would move from OH to IN.
These “useless” surpluses distort the nationwide numbers. They are being counted but they don’t add any real power to the candidate.
Having said all of the above we can raise the question: over what percentage difference, we should refer to a vote as a redundant one? In the above analysis this number is 12%, but I think that it should be around the 9%. In this case SC also becomes a state with a too big Rep margin.
It is clear that at this point Bush has around 3% nationwide margin over Kerry, but from what we saw here, we can derive that Kerry’s situation is not as bad as previously thought.
BTW the numbers here look reasonable. I only would make a minor correction by subtracting 1.5% from Bush’s number in FL.
