A startling set of numbers coming off the 2012 election results is jumping out at me.

It’s the total vote turnout for the two major presidential candidates.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, President Obama and Mitt Romney collected not quite 118 million votes between them this time around. Four years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain gathered slightly more than 128 million votes.

Turnout four years ago was 58.2 percent of registered voters, which was pretty good, but down from the more than 60 percent turnout in 2004, when President George W. Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry.

What is the turnout this time? That’s to be determined when every single ballot is counted. But a decline of 11 million ballots, give or take a few thousand, from the previous four years – along with the increase in individuals registered to vote in that same time span – suggests a serious decline in voter interest in what both sides kept claiming was “the most important election of our lifetime.”

I’ll be anxious to learn what kept so many Americans away from the polls.

Any ideas?