Analysis of Third-Party Voting Patterns between 2008 and 2012

[Oak Hills]

I was curious about how the third-party vote relative to the total vote changed between 2008 and 2012, so I got out my TI-84 calculator and did some computations based on the election results section of this site.

First, it is important to know general statistics about the number of votes cast:
   2008 total: 131,463,122 votes
   2012 total: 129,192,522 votes
   Change: -2,270,600 votes
   % Change: -1.73%

Now that we've got that out of the way:
   2008 third-party vote: 2,013,871 votes
   2012 third-party vote: 2,350,895 votes
   Change in third-party vote from '08 to '12: +337,524 votes
   % change in third party vote total from '08 to '12: +16.76%
   Third-party % of '08 vote: 1.53%
   Third-party % of '12 vote: 1.81%
   %-age-pt. change in third-party vote share: +0.28 %-age pts.

I plan to do similar analyses for individual parties and for individual states later.