There are many spins being offered on the presidential election today. But here’s one that has me puzzled. Multiple headlines from the past month announced that we were expecting “record turnout.” For instance, see this story from CNN.

But with 97% of precincts reporting, according to CNN’s count, Pres.-elect Obama had received roughly 63 million votes, and Sen. McCain had received just shy of 56 million. In 2004, Pres. Bush received 62 million votes, and Sen. Kerry received 59 million. If I am adding correctly, that comes out to 119 million votes cast in 2008, and 121 million votes cast in 2004 (for major parties; third party votes do not change the tallies much. Also, not everyone votes for president, but presumably the majority do, and there’s no reason to suspect the percentage was much different this year than 4 years ago). If we add 3% to the total for this year to account for the precincts that have yet to report, we get just a smidge over 122 million, which would be a record, but hardly a blow-it-out-of-the-park record. There were over 215 million Americans of voting age in 2004, which means there are probably a few more now. No where near the number of people who could vote did. Even if there were 133 million votes cast in 2008, as some initial estimates called for, that’s going to be a lower percentage than turned out in 1960 (when about 63% of eligible Americans did).

It’s one of the fun things of growing older, and watching enough presidential elections, that you know news organizations are going to fall for the exact same stories every time. One biggie is the youth vote. Voters aged 18-29 made up 18% of the electorate this time. That’s a reasonable amount, but only slightly higher in percentage terms, than in 2004 or 2000 (see my take on the youth-vote fetish from USA Today, here). The conservative media keeps falling for a feature story on the “rise” of African-American Republicans. Never happens, alas. And then there’s the record turnout one. I suspect what happens every presidential election is that news reporters call poll workers, who are there every November working 6AM to 9PM even when the only race on the ballot is dog-catcher. The poll workers — for whom the modal experience is seeing no one — say “oh yes, it looks like record turnout!” given that people are actually lining up to vote instead of drifting in off the street, asking for directions to a nearby Starbucks.  So we get stories on record turnout, when the needle really doesn’t move that much.