Kerry Voters are More Intelligent....Or Are They?

A coworker e-mailed me a web page, though he admitted to me that he hadn't checked it out yet. Here's the gist:

People that voted for John Kerry have higher IQs. The site shows a table that lists each state and the average IQ for that state in order from highest IQ to lowest. The top 16 plus 3 more sprinkled in towards the top voted for Kerry and everyone else (mostly below 100 IQ scores) voted for Bush.

When I first saw it, it obviously didn't seem right. It lined up to well and the IQ numbers just didn't make sense. I then set out to do some research.

Lest you be deceived, here is what I found:

This actually originally comes from the 2000 election with Al Gore. The table has merely been re-color coded to reflect the returns of the 2004 election. Apparently this was so appealing to liberals that they believed in it right away and it was even reported in some reputable publications such as the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and the Economist magazine. Shortly after the publications, they were retracted because the numbers are just basically fabricated. This is basically a feel-good table to make people that voted for the candidate that lost.

Here's a web site with this information, not to mention links to the real IQ by State information.

UPDATE:

Mediakit explains more extensively other reasons this is bad data in adition to the numbers being just plain wrong.