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

[Braden Boucek]

I appreciate your perspective. I do, however, respectfully disagree that
turnout alone is a laudable metric or even useful. 90% turnout doesn't mean
that good policy will result or vice versa. Oftentimes the electorate takes
a look at the two candidates on offer and exercises a reasonable choice to
not vote for either (or cast a gesture vote for a third party).  That is a
valid choice that *itself* sends an important political message to the
political parties--not interested, do better. Conversely, widespread
political ignorance is already a problem and bad voting can be worse than
no voting, as Professor Illya Somin has capably argued here
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/03/the-ongoing-debate-over-mandatory-voting/>
and here
<http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Political-Ignorance-Smaller-Government/dp/0804786615>.
The ideal should be informed voting, something that turnout does not
measure.
I appreciate the chance to dialogue.
Braden H. Boucek
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On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 8:26 AM Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Rob Richie
> President and CEO, FairVote
> 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 240
> Takoma Park, MD 20912
> rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
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>
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