I added the permit sales by year numbers as requested.
I can not find any published information for the number of hunters.
They do reference around a 33% success rate for deer hunters, but give no exact data that I can find. The success %/tags number I show is NOT hunter success rate, just a percentage of tags purchased versus used.
That would put the total number of deer hunters somewhere in the 475,000- 500,000 range. Maybe Mike can get the hunter numbers since he has all of the right connections.
In 2011 - 157, 726 hunters killed a deer, of which 114,789 killed one, 30,147 killed 2, 8,581 killed 3, and 4,209 killed 4 or more
A couple of other notes of interest.
Antlerless tags sales are up 61% from since 2006/2007 season
All other tags are up 4.5% over the same time period
During 2010 30,889 buttons were part of the antlerless total harvest
During the 2011 season 18% of the total antlerless harvest was a button buck or 25,836 buttons
Archery percentage of button bucks in the antlerless harvest was slightly better at 17% of their harvest.
The harvest of all of those button bucks is a mixed blessing. It reduces the buck population but it those harvested were converted to all does the population the next year would take a big hit from all of the missing offspring the next spring.