Some Peculiar Numbers

In the last couple of days, there's been an interesting set of statistics being reported in the news outlets. Take this one, for example, from the Washington Post, headlined Election Turnout Falls Short Of Forecasts, arguing the turnout was lower than in previous elections. THIS IS NOT TRUE! I will repeat that-- the assertion that voter turnout was somewhat lower in this election than in some previous elections is an outright, bald-faced lie!

Here is how the Washington Post (normally a reliable paper) manages to shoehorn the headlined lie into the story:

Make no mistake: More people cast ballots this year than in previous elections. But preliminary reports show that the numbers paled in comparison with a surge in voter registration that has taken place since the 2004 presidential election. Turnout as a measure of registrants who voted -- a standard way of calculating the figure -- did not show dramatic increases.

In point of fact, more people cast ballots in this election than in any previous election. A lot more! Leading up to the election, there were unprecedented voter registration drives all across the country. Remember the ACORN debacle? Remember how they said they had registered 1.6 million new voters in the last couple of years? Just before the election they had to recant, and admit they'd only signed up one third of that. And some of the registrations were for Mickey Mouse and the members of the Dallas Cowboys.

Well now the source of this news item (lower voter turnout) is using these inflated numbers to find the ratio of voters to registrants, and finds the ratio has gone down. Surprise! Mickey Mouse didn't show up at the polls. This story is a lie, or at least the information conveyed in the headline is a lie. The statistic being used is meaningless because it's based on numbers that are meaningless.

But why would this particular piece of twisted-logic-from-bad-statistics be found in all the major media outlets? I have to admit I don't know the definitive answer right now. But what I am guessing is the conservatives, facing a more than 2 to 1 defeat in the polls, are doing damage control. A two-thirds majority of an election in which more people voted than ever before indicates a strong mandate for progressive change. Karl Rove and his cronies had their asses handed to them on a plate. The American voters are sick and tired of the status quo. So now they've come up with an imaginary statistic that says, "well compared to the number of new registrations, the turnout was average." Implying, thereby, that the progressive mandate doesn't exist. They're wrong. It does exist. And the newspapers who are reporting this crap news should be outed and exposed. I imagine the source of this item is Scooter Libby (ha, I'm kidding). But it's certainly some right-leaning PR group.

Corporate, conglomerate media are not the outlets or mouthpieces for progressive change, but they can be the opposite. The right's bogeyman of "leftist media" is just that-- a bogeyman-- because it doesn't exist. Instead, we have the Washington Post and most other major papers feeding the American newspaper reader with lies supported by ugly statistical hocus pocus. For shame!