Where have all the voters gone?

For all the talk about massive turnout, it didn't happen. It appears there were about the same number of votes cast for President this year as in 2004.

In St. Louis county, there were slightly more ballots cast than in '04, but they represented a lower percentage of registered voters.

In 2000, we had a 77.25% turnout among 644,126 registered voters.
In 2004, 80.31% of 686,272 voted.
And in 2008, turnout was 77.9% of 716,267.

We didn't even have as big an increase in registrations from 2004 to 2008 as we had from 2000 to 2004.

Maybe the media were projecting their excitement about Obama to the rest of the country?