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Incredible. Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has floated an elaborate conspiracy theory about Wisconsin vote fraud because she doesn’t understand that in the US, “voter turnout” means what percentage of eligible - not registered - voters voted. https://twitter.com/kimstrassel/status/1324093624611532800
Strassel (who's, you know, just asking), says there's something suspicious about the fact that 3.288 million of Wisconsin's 3.684 million registered voters voted in Tuesday's election, because that would be a "(not feasible) 89% turnout."
But voter turnout in the US is not measured by dividing the number of votes by the number of registered voters. It's measured by dividing the number of votes by the number of *eligible* voters - as Strassel would have realized if she'd done 30 seconds of research.
Wisconsin has roughly 4.55 million voting-age adults. So its voter turnout on Tuesday was around 71%, a nice number that was totally in line with other states and thoroughly un-suspicious.
Remarkably, Strassel actually cites the fact that the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says that voter turnout was 71%, but then spends 5 more tweets explaining why that's improbable, all because she thinks turnout is votes/registered voters.
Look, we all make mistakes, particularly on here. But this is a quintessential case of Strassel's ideological blinders - her desire to find something wrong with the vote totals in Wisconsin - making it impossible for her to see what's right in front of her.
Strassel’s first tweet now has 15k likes, so it’s leading lots of people astray and feeding Trumpists’ belief that something fishy happened in Wisconsin and Michigan when it didn’t. Her error’s been pointed out multiple times now - long past time for her to delete the thread.
