New Hampshire Primary: postmortem

My premise is that given a set of medium-sized towns which includes a statistically significant amount of both hand and machine counting, the ratio of votes received by each candidate from AccuVote machines should match the overall ratio for the towns. For example, for towns with 500-800 votes, 41% of total votes were by AccuVote, so I would expect the individual candidates to show 41% of their votes from AccuVote.

However Obama's AccuVote numbers come in significantly lower, and are consistently lowest among the candidates for various vote ranges I've tried. Conversely, Clinton's machine vote numbers are significantly higher than the overall ratio, and consistently highest among the candidates.

Data sources:

Run comparison for towns having between and votes
Swap Clinton/Obama AccuVotes


Stats for New Hampshire 2008 Democratic Primary

111 of 237 towns (46%) used AccuVote machines.
239632 of 284104 total votes (84%) by AccuVote machines.

Considering set of towns with 500-800 votes.
47 towns (19%) had votes in this range, representing 30105 (10%) of total votes.
Within this set, 18 towns (38%) used AccuVote, representing 12435 (41.3%) of votes.
Comparison of hand and machine votes by candidate:

                  Clinton           Obama         Edwards      Richardson
   total:   10758           11541            5522            1653        
    hand:    5986 (55.6%)    7198 (62.4%)    3123 (56.6%)     954 (57.7%)
accuvote:    4772 (44.4%)    4343 (37.6%)    2399 (43.4%)     699 (42.3%)

Stats for New Hampshire 2008 Republican Primary

111 of 237 towns (46%) used AccuVote machines.
197251 of 233424 total votes (84%) by AccuVote machines.

Considering set of towns with 500-800 votes.
35 towns (14%) had votes in this range, representing 22800 (9%) of total votes.
Within this set, 19 towns (54%) used AccuVote, representing 12685 (55.6%) of votes.
Comparison of hand and machine votes by candidate:

                   McCain          Romney        Huckabee        Giuliani            Paul
   total:    8879            6432            2984            1938            2126        
    hand:    4026 (45.3%)    2817 (43.8%)    1317 (44.1%)     819 (42.3%)     954 (44.9%)
accuvote:    4853 (54.7%)    3615 (56.2%)    1667 (55.9%)    1119 (57.7%)    1172 (55.1%)

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