Project Wonderful

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Turnout Got Low, Low, Low, Low


I'm just catching up on some light reading and I came across and an article from Yahoo news that does a really good job of outlining just how miserable turnout was in the 2014 elections.

Voter turnout in last week's midterm elections was terrible. How terrible? Just 36.3 percent of eligible voters cast votes — the worst turnout in 72 years, the New York Times reports. Only the 1942 election (33.9 percent) had a lower rate of voter turnout.

Here's a quick breakdown, based on preliminary estimates of voting data from the United States Elections Project:

• Less than half of the eligible voters in 43 states cast votes.

• The seven that saw more than half: Maine, Wisconsin, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota and Iowa.

• No state cracked 60 percent.

• Maine, at 59.3 percent, had the highest voter turnout percentage-wise in the country.

• Indiana, at 28 percent, had the lowest.

• In California, Texas and New York — the three largest states in terms of population — less than a third of eligible voters voted.

• New York, at 28.8 percent, had the fourth lowest turnout rate in the country.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to add, but I wanted to share it with you all and also keep it here archived so that we have easy access to these statistics later. We have to do better.

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