2008 Voter Turnout

Consider the following headlines from before the 2008 election:

• VOTE 2008: Record Number Of Voter Expected To Deluge Polls
  
• Early voting suggests 2008 may see record turnout, expert says
  
• Virgina, Pennsylvania, Ohio Not Prepared for Record Voter Turnout
  
• Record voter registration floods N.J. offices
  
• Voter registration smashes records
  

Seems pretty positive, doesn't it?  Well if you look up the stats on voter turnout, you'll see that all of these people were wrong.  52.4% of the eligible population of the United States voted in the 2008 presidential election.  Not bad, right?  Well actually, yes it is bad.  Here are the stats on previous presidential elections:

• 2004 - 55.9%
  
• 2000 - 55.3%
  
• 1996 - 48.1%
  
• 1992 - 58.1%
  
• 1988 - 52.8%
  
• 1984 - 55.2%
  
• 1980 - 54.2%  (statistics from http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout.html)

This year's election was the second worst, with regard to turnout, in the last quarter century.  Okay fine, so they were wrong; no big whoop.  However, consider this headline from after the election: 2008 Turnout Shatters all Records.  Umm...what?  The first line states that 130 million Americans voted in the 2008 election, a record number.  Well yeah, it's a record number, but only because the total number of eligible citizens keeps increasing.   They even got the number wrong.  Only 121 million people voted, not 130 million.  

People rant about how lousy the press had gotten -- some of it deserved and some of it not -- and misleading and inaccurate reporting like this isn't going to help.

First Entry

I started a blog experiment on MySpace a few years back.  However, I don't really use that anymore, so I'll be moving my blog entries from there to here.