On a Phish message board that's been partially taken over by conservative trolls for some reason, the following point has been made over and over today, "Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in absentee voting in VA, OH, and IA." It's part of a larger point that we're disinterested.
I haven't looked up VA and OH it's impossible to tell by how they register party affiliation, but I don't see how they get there with Iowa. According to http://elections.gmu.edu/... , in 2008 there were 481,179 votes, 46.9% of which were registered as Democrats. That's under 226,000 voters. So far in 2012 according to the SoS ( http://sos.iowa.gov/... ), 261,166 Democratic ballots have been received with 3 days to go. I don't see how 261k is less than 226k.
Am I missing something obvious or are they just lying again. I'm assuming they're lying. If someone tells you that, there's your counter.
By the way the SoS site also shows that we have a 20k gap in ballots received but not yet returned. Assuming the vast majority of them do get submitted (which I figure is a safe-ish assumption), that'll make the gap very similar to 2008's but with a lot more ballots shifted to early voting meaning there will be far fewer votes to make it up.