Count all the votes, just don't worry about the ones that didn't vote because they didn't count

As the rules and bylaws committee meets today to decide how best to punish Florida and Michigan, Talking Points Memo brings up an excellent point. While the Clinton campaign is railing about how every vote should count, they're ignoring a key factor. Since everyone (including Senator Clinton) knew at the time of those primaries that they would be meaningless, a lot of people simply didn't bother going to vote.

The guys over at TPM ran a statistical analysis to attempt to quantify just how many voters may have decided to stay home. They based their analysis upon a correlation between the percentage of Democratic primary voters in a state to their total primary voters, to the percentage of votes that John Kerry received in the 2004 general election.

Their findings? As many as 500,000 voters in Michigan, and nearly 1 million in Florida, may have decided to stay home.

How might they have decided to vote? I would speculate that they would lean towards Obama, but there's no way of really knowing. But again, this isn't important to Clinton, because they only want to count the votes that help them out.