[EL] This is the highest turnout of voting age citizens in American history

[Rob Richie]

I keep seeing references to our turnout being the highest "in the modern
era", as in Farhad Manjoo's valuable New York Times lead commentary today,
or since some specific election before the 19th amendment a century ago
extended suffrage rights to voting-age women.

In comparisons across countries, like this useful one at the Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance
<https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/voter-turnout>, the most basic
measure of degree of relative democratization is the percentage of the
voting age population that casts ballots. To be sure, one can also measure
turnout by looking at percentages of the vote of the population allowed by
a nation to vote, but prioritizing that measure can mean ignoring
undemocratic practices like disenfranchising women and racial and ethnic
minorities.

So... two cheers for the US having its highest turnout ever among our
voting-age population, which is about 62% according to  the United States
Election Project <http://www.electproject.org/2020g>and approaching 67% of
citizens of voting age citizens who are eligible to vote (with the
difference largely due noncitizen residents and disenfranchised citizens
with felony convictions, with citizens and residents in American
territories like Puerto Rico not part of the denominator.)
.
Being a democratic idealist, I'll reserve three cheers for when we can
approach Malta, which has had only one election with less than 90% turnout
<https://www.idea.int/data-tools/world-view/40?st=all#rep>of its voting age
population in the past 25 years --and regularly has the highest turnout
among democracies without compulsory voting and uses the ranked choice
voting form of proportional representation (the candidate-based "single
transferable vote") contributing to a highly competitive electoral culture.

Rob

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