Percentage of how many people vote

Twitter ElectProject. Michael McDonald Bio. Raw data for the charts below are provided here. Turnout Rates: Race and Ethnicity. Contact: Michael P. Box Gainesville, FL phone : office e-mail: michael.

For a demographic profile of the electorate, we must turn to surveys. The CPS is a large survey primarily used to calculate the nation's unemployment rate. In Chile, for example, turnout plunged after the country moved from compulsory to voluntary voting in and began automatically putting all eligible citizens on the voter rolls.

In the U. And registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U. The U. As a consequence, turnout comparisons based only on registered voters may not be very meaningful.

For instance, U. But registered voters in the U. There are even more ways to calculate turnout. Using those calculations, U. Since , voting-age turnout has remained within an 8. However, turnout varies considerably among different racial, ethnic and age groups. In several other OECD countries, turnout has drifted lower in recent decades. On the other hand, turnout in recent elections has bumped up in several OECD countries. In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data.

Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. For this post, we originally wanted to base our analysis on total ballots counted, a metric that includes all ballots regardless of offices voted for.

But not all states have reported total-ballots data, so we turned our attention to the presidential race, which nearly always is the one that attracts the most votes. Presidential Elections , supplemented when necessary by data from the Clerk of the U. House of Representatives. For comparative purposes, we calculated the presidential-vote totals as percentages of three separate measures of the potential voter pool: the and-over population as of July 1, as estimated by the Census Bureau ; those numbers interpolated to Nov.

In Hawaii, turnout rose from In Utah, turnout increased by about 11 percentage points, from The smallest turnout increases, as shares of estimated eligible voters, were in North Dakota 3. Minnesota had the highest turnout of any state last year, with Colorado, Maine and Wisconsin all followed close behind, at about The lowest-turnout states were Tennessee The Census Bureau will release its own estimates of turnout later this year, using a somewhat different methodology people who say they voted as a share of estimated voting-age population.

Despite the big bump in turnout last year, the U. Out of 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for which estimates of voting-age population in the most recent national election were available, U. In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data.