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%)