Based on 2008 total votes cast, 14 million voters stayed home. About 10 million for BHO, 4m for Romney.
If you include normal population growth it gets worse.
12 to 14 million for BHO
6 to 8 million for R.
Of the 220m or so eligible voters in the US, 117m cast ballots (60%) in 2012, In 2008 62% of eligible voters (131m) cast a ballot. The electorate shrank, again, also back to 2004 levels.
I can not believe Romney did worse the McCain in total voter turn out. Even if he had McCains 59.5m votes, Romney still loses bu a nose.
I would have (and did) bet the farm that Republican voter turn out would have been up, not down.
Very sad.
That's just it - throughout the day, in several of the swing states, there were those little electronic reports showing that GOP turnout (measured in terms of who is actually showing up, having their bar code read, and being signed in as having voted) was up, and Dem turnout was down, both in direct comparison to each other, and versus the numbers in 2008.
And then we wake up to find out that 3.5 million or more Republicans didn't vote, including in a lot of the swing states?
No. I don't accept that this is just some fluke, or that the official numbers of voters was somehow uniformly wrong. Not when EVERY OTHER piece of data - from the polls, to the measures of partisan affiliation, to the measures of relative enthusiasm, to the way independents and white voters were going, and many more pieces - were pointing to the exact same thing.
Asking me to discount all of this is like telling me that, hey, that theory of gravity thing works almost all of the time, but in this one case, you're just going to have to accept that iron bars can float up into the air on their own accord.
No. Not buying it. This election was defrauded. It was defrauded in a major way.