Hey tigerGC, when you add up:
The allotment of DV visa numbers for each region is approximately as follows: Africa, 20,426; Asia, 7,087; Europe, 24,257; North America (Bahamas): 8, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean: 2,407; and Oceania, 815.
you get a magic 55000
What I think
www.lawcom.com has done is make a guess based on qualified applicants as to how many visas MAY go to each region. They have taken the over all DV-2007 results and broken down all the qualified applicants into a percentage. Then used that percentage to estimate how many visas MAY go to that region.
For example Africa, 20426/55000 = 0.37 * 100 = 37% so probably 37% of the qualified applicants for the 2007-DV came from Africa. Although I cant find an official figure for this anywhere.
An official regional breakdown for 2008 DV applicants exists alright. I would be dubious about these numbers, they are very very loosely approximate. I have done some number crunching over the last few DV’s and only in 2005 did Europe come even close to actually receiving 24000 GC’s in 2005 EU got only 20,000 GC’s and in 2006 EU got only 14,000 GC’s. so I think that clears up the mystery of those particular numbers. There are so many numbers on DV and visas, it is hard to make any sense of any of them!