Voter Turnout

Voting participation by Americans is lower than in most democratic nations. Much was made after President Bill Clinton's relatively easy 1996 reelection victory of the fact that just 49 percent of the nation's voting-age population (the standard measure of turnout for many years) had actually cast votes. Participation in midterm congressional elections might be as low as a third of the voting-age population. Voting in local elections can often amount to a tiny fraction of the electorate.

In the 2004 presidential elections, 60.3 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. CQ Photo/Scott J. Ferrell

Many political activists and analysts describe low voter turnout as a critical problem for the nation, a sign of a dangerous disconnect between Americans and their governing institutions. Nonprofit, nonpartisan groups alone spend millions of dollars on voter education and awareness drives to urge people to exercise their patriotic duty and preserve their self-interest by participating in the processes of democratic self-governance. And that is in addition to candidates' and partisans' exertions targeted at persuading people sympathetic to their causes to get out and vote.

There is a sizable faction among political scientists and others, however, that disagrees about the statistical dimensions of voter turnout and how big a problem it is. Some researchers have determined that using voting-age population as [Page 657]the baseline for measuring turnout provides an inaccurate and unnecessarily dire view of voting participation, because it includes millions of U.S. residents, such as noncitizens and most felons, who are not eligible to vote.

George Mason University political science professor Michael P. McDonald, who heads the United States Election Project, is prominent among those who believe that turnout should be measured as a percentage of the voting-eligible population, which excludes those who could not vote even if they wanted to. His calculations for the 2010 midterm elections showed that turnout was 40.9 percent of the voting-eligible population, compared with 36.8 percent of the voting-age population. The comparable figures for the 2008 presidential election were 61.6 percent of voting-eligible versus 56.8 percent of the voting-age population.

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