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 [1], only 1100 people participated in the Republican caucus. 1100 people out of the entire state of about 1,816,856 (according to Wikipedia [2]). 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 [3], 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.