Follow the math

According to this article in today’s (Maine) Portland Press Herald, there are 1,060 million registered voters in Maine. That struck me as odd because Maine’s total population is only 1.34 million, and though it is the state with the oldest population in the country, could there really be only 300,000 under-18 children? Turns out, no: there are 557,219 of them.

According to my iPhone’s calculator, that’s a difference of 277,219 — is the headcount of under-18s off by that much, or are the voter rolls loaded with non-existent ghosts?

I know what I suspect, but really, this is more a post about the incurious ignorance of today’s reporters. You’d expect — I’d expect, anyway — that a Maine reporter or at least his editor, would know the size of the state’s population, and a figure like 1.060 million voters would ring an alarm bell, but the ability to hold two facts in the brain simultaneously seems to be a lost art in modern “journalism”.