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One contention in your post... I find it's often (check the figures) that sometimes some races like Senate or for the House or local ones receive more votes than the total that voted for President.

I myself have wondered about his for years. For example, in Tenn, in 1996 the Fred Thompson Senate race had more total votes than that for President and even beat out the total of all House votes.

This means simply that some people, for whatever reason, vote locally for state politicians and U.S. representatives but for some reason don't bother voting for president. I know, it's weird.

But the Gore people are just as confused and, if you remember, tried to count non votes for president for Gore because of "voter intent" since they punched all other Democrats on the card (probably the stupidist argument made during the recount). They too didn't understand why someone wouldn't vote in all races.

I understand about local votes, but the three Votomatic counties I specifically mentioned where McCollum received more votes than Bush were odd for other reasons - I simply didn't want to get bogged down in detail making the larger point. The Votomatic counties were better counties for Gore. He received a larger % of his registered Dem. votes overall in punch card counties. His top 50% counties were ALL punch card counties. Bush's worst counties - Republican votes vs. registered Republicans - were punch card counties - especially Votomatic counties.