Saving American Elections: A Diagnosis and Prescription for a He ...

Figure 1.1 shows voter turnout levels for presidential elections since 1960. As the chart shows, participation in presidential elections fell after the 1960s, and (with a few exceptions) remained low, with just over half of all eligible voters voting in most presidential elections. If the southern states are excluded, the decline in voter participation is even more dramatic, dropping more than twenty percentage points between 1960 and 1996.¹² The electorate’s mediocre performance since the 1960s happened despite changes that should have led to increases—not decreases—in participation, including the removal of many of the barriers to participation, the increased use of same-day registration and no-excuse absentee or early voting, communications revolutions that have brought politics into nearly every American’s home via television and the Internet, and increasing levels of formal education.

Although some might argue that six in ten eligible voters’ participating in the two most recent presidential contests is not insignificant, the national levels of voting participation in presidential contests seem to represent the highest levels among the U.S. public. In presidential elections, participation varies widely from state to state. The highest turnout in the 2008 election was in Minnesota, where 76.1 percent of the eligible electorate voted in 2008; the lowest turnout was in Hawaii (coincidentally, the state where Barack Obama was born), where 49.4 percent voted.¹³ Additionally, elections with presidential contests represent the high-water mark for voter turnout in the United States. Consider the 2002 election, in which voters decided on 34 members of the U.S. Senate, 435 members of the U.S. House, governors and statewide constitutional officers in 36 states, some 6,214 state legislators, and over 200 ballot measures. Despite the importance of these decisions and the fact that the election took place a year after the September 11 attacks—that is, at a time of heightened patriotism—only 39.5 percent of the eligible public voted.¹⁴ There was little improvement for the 2006 election. As figure 1.2 shows, having just four in ten eligible voters cast ballots in a midterm election is typical in the United States.¹⁵ By way of comparison, in an international ranking of voter turnout for parliamentary and legislative elections between 1945 and 2001, the United States ranked 138 out of 169 countries.¹⁶