In my last post on voter turnout, I promised an update when final numbers were in…and here we are.  In the meantime, I’ve been researching the topic and found Dr. Michael McDonald’s United States Elections Project to be extremely valuable.  I’ll summarize, but I encourage you to check out the US Elections Project Web site.

The voting-age population (VAP) is traditionally used to calculate turnout, and includes anyone of voting age living in the US.  However, as Dr. McDonald argues, the VAP includes non-US citizens and felons who are ineligible to vote, while it excludes eligible voters living outside of the US.  He has come up with a way to calculate the voting-eligible population (VEP), which attempts to correct for these flaws.  I find the VEP much more precise for determining voter turnout.

The fascinating thing about his research is that it reveals that voter turnout has not been as low in recent decades as previously thought.  Check out his chart below, which shows the difference in voter turnout calculations between VAP & VEP:

Presidential Turnout Rates: 1948-2008, from the United States Election Project

Note the ever-widening gap between VAP turnout rate (yellow) and VEP turnout rate (green).  Since 1972, the VAP has become less accurate for determining voter turnout; almost a 5% difference in 2008.

How’s that for a prelude?  Now we’re ready to take a look at this year’s election turnout, which was 61.6% based on VEP calculations; right up there with the 1968 election.

I took Dr. McDonald’s 2008 state election turnout rates and mapped them using Inkscape.  The map is in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format (Firefox, Opera & others should be fine, but IE users will need the Adobe SVG viewer plugin).  Unfortunately SVG is not a standard yet, but based on my limited exposure to it so far, I’m a fan.  In Firefox, hovering over a state will reveal the % voter turnout for that state (I’m not sure why I can’t get this to work with Opera & IE).  Select the thumbnail below for the SVG version (or if you prefer, here’s a link to the less-cool but stable JPG version).

Voter Turnout by State in the 2008 Presidential Elections

And below are my findings & analysis.  Standard JPG format here.  Of particular interest to me was the fact that the blue states had 4.9% higher turnout than red states in the 2008 election.  It was also fascinating that Minnesota has the highest turnout for the past 3 presidential elections.  I wonder if that hotly contested Senate race had anything to do with it this year…  As usual, select the image for a larger version.

Summary of Voter Participation in the 2008 Presidential Election

Thanks again to Dr. McDonald for his excellent work on voter turnout.