Turnout, Again
A commenter and Henry have pointed to Michael McDonald’s website for the 130 million number on turnout, but McDonald’s numbers are estimates and so far, the actual votes being reported are coming up far short. For example, McDonald estimates 14.9 million votes for CA, but with 95 of precincts reporting, the NYT has a vote total of under 10 million. In Illinois, McDonald estimates 5.4 million, but the NYT totals has it at just over 5.0 million. The same is true for most other states. I’m sure that the reported total will change a bit with updates and adjustments, but nothing on the order of 10 to 15 million votes.
Comments
I had to speak to this in my class today, as I just couldn’t see how the different sets of numbers reconcile. I’m glad to see I”m not the only one perplexed, but (speaking as a non-Americanist) what gives?
Are turnout numbers made up? Or is there an implication that 10-12M voters cast ballots with no presidential choice on them?
Posted by: Joel | November 5, 2008 05:51 PM
My understanding from communicating with Michael McDonald is that there are still millions of ballots to be counted (AP is estimating 3-4 million ballots still left to be counted in California, for example. Michael has pointed me to this PDF which has uncounted ballots figures for some counties, but is highly incomplete (e.g. no figures for Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties among many others).
Posted by: Henry | November 6, 2008 03:00 PM
Interesting. I took the “97% precincts reporting” data (at CNN, for instance) on Wednesday as indicating that I could divide the vote total by .97 to get a projected (overall) total. Which, at the time, would have driven the total vote count to about 121.5M or so, IIRC.
If that many ballots still remain to be counted as of today, then the “97% reporting” yesterday morning must have been bunk.
Posted by: Joel | November 6, 2008 09:30 PM