I saw this brief article by Sherry Sperry from National Geograpic and was surprised by the high rate of US voter turnout in the last election. Then I read the explanation about how the percentage of voter age population (VAP) has been calculated. Apparently, in the past, the VAP included non-citizens and felons when we should have been using the voter eligible population (VEP). I was already reading about voting apathy in the past 4-5 presidential elections, but it turns out that there is an upward trend in voter turnout. So, there still is hope for my generation! Our numbers are now about as good as the numbers from 1968, but I still find this 89% presented on this chart to be a little too high.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Voter Turnout
I saw this brief article by Sherry Sperry from National Geograpic and was surprised by the high rate of US voter turnout in the last election. Then I read the explanation about how the percentage of voter age population (VAP) has been calculated. Apparently, in the past, the VAP included non-citizens and felons when we should have been using the voter eligible population (VEP). I was already reading about voting apathy in the past 4-5 presidential elections, but it turns out that there is an upward trend in voter turnout. So, there still is hope for my generation! Our numbers are now about as good as the numbers from 1968, but I still find this 89% presented on this chart to be a little too high.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment