The Case of the Disappearing Democrat

This post at Slate is the more remarkable thing I've read in years. We are all aware, sometimes too much, of demographic trends in the electorate; it's getting older, it's getting browner but never it disappeared. Wisconsin is one of several states where election outcomes are driven by a single large city that votes overwhelmingly blue against a more or less red hinterland. What if suddenly Milwaukee's huge Democratic majority disappeared? We should know the answer to that in just two months. Milwaukee has suddenly lost 60% of it's black voters and nobody knows why. This is grim news for Tammy Baldwin and Barack Obama.
According to the Slate post, last April the League of Young Voters, presumably a Democratic front group, canvassed 208 of Milwaukee's 317 precincts, knocking on 121,000 doors of registered voters. The canvassers were able to successfully find and interact with only 31 percent of their targets. Twice that number were confirmed to no longer live at the address on file, either because a structure was abandoned or condemned, or if a current resident reported that the targeted voter no longer lived there. Their extrapolations estimated the loss of 160,000 registered Democrats half of them under 35 years of age. Gee, they got the great ground game, the high tech cell phone ap that sniffs out Democrats, it just that they don't have voters.
A related NPR post blames high foreclosure rates in Florida for leaving holes in voter registration roles. It also predicts a declining importance of Cleveland in Ohio elections.

Ohio, one of the most reliable bellwethers, has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election since 1964. The Romney campaign is targeting suburbs and smaller towns that lean toward Republican candidates, while the Obama campaign is trying to mobilize large metropolitan areas that delivered him the state in 2008.
Obama supporters are finding the task more difficult this year in Ohio's two largest cities, Columbus and Cleveland, where foreclosures are highest. In the first half of the year, more than 10,717 properties, or 1 in every 89 homes, were in foreclosure in Cleveland.
Most of the properties are on the city's heavily Democratic east side, where thousands of homes bear an "X," marked for demolition.
"You see it in every precinct," says Samara Knight, vice president of the Service Employees International Union in Cleveland, who is leading a voter canvassing effort. The SEIU has endorsed Obama.
Since 2008, more than 99,000 of Cleveland's registered voters have dropped off the rolls, a loss of 26 percent.

Neither of these posts ask the question, how many of these voters were fictional creations of ACORN voter registration drives? Is it just coincidental that a young, transitory, voting bloc disappears when voter ID laws are passed? In any event we can expect to hear much shock and maybe some outrage election night.