Edited to add: I overlooked the posts citing Snopes.com when I wrote this, so it's a bit redundant.
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul ,
Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the last
Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 McCain: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 McCain: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million McCain: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Obama: 13.2
McCain: 2.1
That first line of "facts" doesn't even need to be compared to an external source to be recognized as nonsense. There are 50 US states plus the District of Columbia. If Obama won 19 of them and McCain 23, that leaves at least 8 states unaccounted for. Are we supposed to believe that one or more third-party candidates won 8 states?
As it happens, the
actual tally is: Obama, 27 states plus DC (CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, HI, IN, IA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, NV, NH, NJ, NM, NY, NC, OH, OR, RI, VT, VA, WA, WI); McCain, 23 (AL, AK, AZ, AR, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, MS, MO, MT, NE (2 of 3 electoral districts), ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY).
Given that the first checkable claim is easily shown to be completely false, the rest of the claims don't have much credibility.
Added after writing the above: found at
Factcheck.org, which quotes the same e-mail message:
Fact Check said:
First, Joseph Olson is a professor at Hamline (not Hemline) University School of Law in St. Paul, Minn. None of what appears in this e-mail was written by him. He has been denying authorship of this old hoax since earlier versions first cropped up after the 2000 election.
And further:
Fact Check said:
More important, the "unreported stats" listed in this e-mail are all wrong:
President-elect Barack Obama actually carried 28 states (and the District of Columbia), not 20 as claimed in the message. Sen. John McCain carried only 22 states, not 30.
The total area of states won by Obama is actually 1,483,702 square miles, significantly more than the 580,000 stated by the e-mail. McCain’s states have an area of 2,310,315 square miles, not the 2,427,000 claimed.
The population of counties carried by Obama is just under 183 million, not the 127 million claimed. McCain carried counties with a total population of just under 119 million, far fewer than claimed in this message.
The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than claimed in the message.
Hmm. I don't know how they get the count of 28 states plus DC for Obama. Nebraska had its 3 votes divided among 3 districts, of which 1 went to Obama and 2 to McCain. Not sure what that has to do with it.