The military

[Tom Brown]

I was watching CNN election coverage and their informal poll showed Kerry having a surprising number of votes among soldiers stationed in Iraq.
Isn't the military almost completely republican, by tradition?
The other thing that surprised me was how few soldiers said they intended to vote. I would have thought roughly 100% would vote but it would seem to be closer to 25%, according to that particular news segment.

[572Daytona]

I was watching CNN election coverage and their informal poll showed Kerry having a surprising number of votes among soldiers stationed in Iraq.
Isn't the military almost completely republican, by tradition?
The other thing that surprised me was how few soldiers said they intended to vote. I would have thought roughly 100% would vote but it would seem to be closer to 25%, according to that particular news segment.
I'm sure that the Canadian News Network is presenting the story and data in they way that they want you to interpert it. I would suspect that both of the percentage of soldiers that vote republiccan and the percentage total that vote are both higher than the US populations as a whole.

[Tom Brown]

Do they keep track of those stats after an election?

[572Daytona]

They do and it looks like I was wrong, here are some stats that I've found:
102 million people voted. That yields the widely-reported 52% figure.
123 million people were registered to vote. That's 62% of the eligible population.
198 million people are eligible to register. So 83% of those registered actually voted.
275 million people live in America (80 million are under 18 or otherwise ineligible).
Or course this is across all age groups, 18-20yr olds tend to be lower but probably not only 25%