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Super Tuesday -- West Virginia demonstrates how little people really care...
EDIT: 02-13-08 -- As noted in the comments below, it would appear that the numbers reported by Fox News (and other news outlets) may not actually represent the actual number of individual voters that participated in the West Virginia primary/caucus (which is it in WV, anyway?, I've read conflicting reports on that too).
Until I can confirm exactly how the process works in WV, one should probably assume that much of this article is inaccurate. I'm leaving it intact for the moment, at least until I can get the actual details ironed out. The point I was trying to make remains valid, however, for plenty of other reasons... Even if 200,000 people end up voting (in both party's elections), that's still a pretty poor turnout in terms of the percentage of the population.
Original article follows below:
Apparently, the people in West Virginia don't get too involved in politics. According to the Fox News results, only 1100 people participated in the Republican caucus. 1100 people out of the entire state of about 1,816,856 (according to Wikipedia). While I don't yet have the information on the percentage of Republicans vs Democrats in that state, basic math tells you that's a pretty small percentage of the total population (only 0.0605441%, it would seem).
The Democratic primary in West Virginia isn't until May 13th, so we won't get the full picture until then.
Meanwhile, it's worth a chuckle seeing John McCain only getting 12 votes in the entire state, and Ron Paul not having a single person vote for him in all of West Virginia... Makes you wonder if either candidate made any effort in the state at all -- I bet that if I just randomly sent out a couple thousand postcards throughout any given state, I could get more than 12 people to vote for me, having never even heard of me before...
So why did so few people show up to vote? My guess is that they don't care. It's no real surprise that interest in politics is generally low among the general population, but this is really sad.
Especially after what happened in the 2000 general election, you would think that people would start to realize that their vote really does matter.
Tony You misunderstood the
Tony
You misunderstood the WV Republican Convention and how it worked. A total of 1200 delegates were elected to represent the 55 counties, depending on the population of that county, and only those delegates attended the convention and were allowed to vote.
The vote totals you referenced were only for the last round of voting. Ron Paul received over 100 votes and John McCain received over 150 in the first round of voting. Since Ron Paul had the least number of votes he was eliminated in the next round and most of his supporters gave their support to the remaining three candidates and all but 12 of the John McCain delegates voted for one of the two remaining candidates in the next round.
I sure that many West Virginians will go to the polls in May and vote for their favorite candidate.
Hmmm...Interesting...
So what you're saying is that the numbers that all of the major news networks are reporting are the number of delegates elected to the WV convention, not the total number of voters? A bit odd that none of the news outlets mentioned this.
Still, your point tends to be supported by the fact that according to this PDF from the West Virginia Secretary of State's office, 89,833 people voted in the 2006 Republican primary. So logic suggests that 88,000 people didn't one day decide they don't care about the political process...
I'll have to do more research on this. Until I can confirm all the facts, I've edited my article to reflect it's possible inaccuracy.