Are you sure that your friends didn’t mean that Kerry only won three counties in your state? That’s certainly possible.
If you look at the results for Michigan (which Kerry won) you’ll see that only a handfull of counties were “blue,” most of them around Detroit. The rest of the state was red. Ditto for Illinois: the area around Chicago was blue, and the rest of the state was red.
Kerry also didn’t win any counties in Lousiana. <ducking and running>
Re splitting the vote up by House Districts.
According to Polidata http://www.polidata.org/maps/cdrch.htm Republicans won 231 districts to Democrats 201 (there were still a few undecided when they put the data together.) Add three votes for the District of Columbia, and then give two votes for each state. Kerry won 18 states, for 36 votes, plus 3 for the District of Columbia and 201 for House Districts.
So if my seat of the pants computations are right, if the electoral vote were proportional, Kerry would have had 240 votes and Bush would have had about 295 – not a huge difference from the actual electoral vote.
Since Kerry won more than 3 states, he must have won more than 3 counties. You can’t win a state if you lose every county in that state. Your friends need to brush up on their math/logic skills. So, the minimum number of counties he won must by greater than or equal to the number of states he won. And it would be HIGHLY improbably for him to get by with only one county per state that he won…
Sad to say there’s some noise in that signal, as well.
Yes, congressional districts are approximately equal in population. But that population is a mix of citizens and non-citizens. In extremis one district could have 500,000 non-US citizens and 1 citizen (potential voter) and be counted the same as a district in which all residents were citizens (and therefore potential voters).
Which, then, would be more helpful in answering our question?
A particular bugaboo of mine, I admit.