Voter turnout in United States presidential elections
[4] In their 2001 article in the American Political Science Review, Michael P. McDonald and Samuel Popkin developed a measure they called the Voting Eligible Population (VEP).
Despite Constitutional amendments prohibiting restrictions of the franchise by race, sex, or against people over 18, and outlawing the poll tax, and other national legislation, states still administer voter registration and elections, in ways which can impact turnout, and variations in competitiveness between the states lead to variations in turnout.
[13] Older states with property restrictions dropped them, namely all but Rhode Island, Virginia and North Carolina by the mid-1820s.
In Rhode Island, the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s demonstrated that the demand for equal suffrage was broad and strong, although the subsequent reform included a significant property requirement for any resident born outside of the United States.
[16] Tax-paying qualifications remained in only five states by 1860 – Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and North Carolina.
Held in Baltimore, Maryland, September 26–28, 1831, it transformed the process by which political parties select their presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
[18] The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 gave African American men the right to vote.
United States vs. Reese (1876), the first supreme court decision interpreting the fifteenth amendment, may have set the cause of African American male suffrage back again.
[26] The lack of systematic data tracking voter turnout in presidential elections before 1964 makes speculation on the voting gender gap before 1964 challenging.
[33] As such, since most candidates running for office are pervasively over the age of 35 years,[34] youth may not be actively voting in these elections because of a lack of representation or visibility in the political process.
In fact, they argue that "Millennials are turning out at similar rates to the previous two generations when they face their first elections.
[36] This study demonstrated the effect of rising enrollment in college education circa 1980s, which resulted in an increase in voter turnout.
Based on this article, one may surmise that education has become a more powerful predictor of civic participation, discriminating more between voters and non-voters.
Gallego (2010) also contends that voter turnout tends to be higher in localities where voting mechanisms have been established and are easy to operate – i.e. voter turnout and participation tends to be high in instances where registration has been initiated by the state and the number of electoral parties is small.
Though youth in larger (that is, urban) cities tend to be more educated than those in rural areas (Marcus & Krupnick, 2017), perhaps there is an external variable (i.e. election infrastructure) at play.
Smith and Tolbert's (2005) research reiterates that the presence of ballot initiatives and portals within a state have a positive effect on voter turnout.
[39] Another factor influencing statistics on voter turnout is the percentage of the country's voting-age population[clarification needed] who are ineligible to vote due to non-citizen status or prior felony convictions.
In a 2001 article in the American Political Science Review, Michael P. McDonald and Samuel Popkin argued, that at least in the United States, voter turnout since 1972 has not actually declined when calculated for those eligible to vote, what they term the voting-eligible population.
[40][clarification needed] In 1972, noncitizens and ineligible felons (depending on state law) constituted about 2% of the voting-age population.
