This is an update to my prior post that made it to the front page. (I'm still a bit in shock over that, and want to thank kos again for putting it up.)
Here are the latest totals I have:
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Total votes cast: 131,044,532
Obama: 69,003,839
McCain: 59,752,660
Margin: 9,251,179</div>
You'll notice the totals for Obama and McCain have not changed much since the update at 130.6 million. The reason is that I've gone back and started including "total ballots cast" to the totals, which include a lot of write in candidates or under / over votes. Some states and counties are better than others in identifying all write in votes, so there are instances where these "other" votes are valid write-in votes, but the county just didn't identify them as write-in. Regardless, I would consider an under or over votes a part of the total turnout, even if the voter didn't want to vote in the Presidential election.
Also, the margin may continue to change up or down as additional counties report, although the ultimate margin will be more than the 9.25 million since the biggest counties remaining (as far as I can tell) are in Obama friendly areas, specifically New York City.
More after the jump.
Ultimately, we should see about a 9 million increase in turnout (from about 123 million in 2004 to 132 million in 2008), although the 2004 may be a bit understated depending on how many under / over votes there were. The two major candidates combined for a little more than 121 million, and third party candidates combined for ~1 million. (I don't have a good number for the third party candidates in 2004).
In 2008, the major party candidates have combined for 128.75 million votes, but this should increase over 129 million when the final totals are available, or an 8 million increase for the two major party candidates from 2004 to 2008. For third party candidates and "write-in" candidates, the total is about 2 million, which may mean my 2004 number is low for third party and write-in candidates, which may also mean total turnout in 2004 was closer to 124 million than 123 million if we included all third party, write-in, and over/under counts.
Some interesting, random statistics:
The only states currently with fewer votes cast in 2008 than 2004 are:
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ME (although not sure if certified)
NY (although should end up positive when all the votes are counted)
OH (although should end up positive when all the votes are counted)
OK
SD
WI
WV (at negative 4%, anyone know what happened here?)</div>
Note that these are NOT the same as whether turnout was up or down, since the eligible voter base increased in most states, so just because a state had more voters, doesn't mean turnout was up.
The 5 states with the largest percentage increases in votes cast were:
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NC - 23.13% increase
SC - 19.87% increase
GA - 19.26% increase
DC - 17.52% increase
NV - 16.88% increase</div>
Obama got a smaller percent of the votes in only 6 states:
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AR - 6.02% decrease (this along with WV are the biggest ?s in my mind in terms of "what happened"?)
LA - 2.28% decrease
TN - 0.81% decrease
WV - 0.75% decrease
MA - 0.68% decrease
OK - 0.08% decrease</div>
If you want to know some other statistics, post in the comments, and I'll see if I can dig it out.