Who won in 2008?

I recently came upon a new idea for counting votes in an election. Instead of only counting votes cast and ignoring those who abstain, abstentions would be counted in their own category. For example, in a district one candidate might get 55% of the vote and the other 45%. However, if over half of the population didn't vote at all, then abstaining votes would win and no candidate would be selected. While this might seem bad, it gives political parties a stronger incentive to see that everyone votes. Currently, those incentives don't really exist, all a candidate has to do is get more voters than the other candidate, regardless of how many people vote. It would also limit voter disenfranchisement as they would then count as abstaining votes and cause neither candidate to win.

I decided to see what would have happened if this rule was applied to the 2008 election. In 2008, 58% of everyone over the age of 18 voted, the highest voter turnout since 1968. However, this means that 42% of potential voters abstained. If these abstentions were counted, the break down of the vote would be:
Abstain: 42%
Obama: 31%
McCain: 27%
Other: 1%

Abstentions end up winning by a wide margin. Broken down to the state level, the results are very ugly:


Obama and McCain only win a handful of states, the majority, and the winner of the Electoral College with 428 votes. Clearly, a huge portion of the US population isn't having their voice heard.

In order to produce a situation where Obama beats abstentions, voter turnout would have to be over 69%.