The culmination of 34 years in the vineyards:
This
week CQ Press will publish Voter Turnout 1788 – the Present, which I compiled
(with help from research assistants), edited (with help from CQ press),
organized and, in brief, interpreted. The book provides in readable charts:
1. the number of age-eligible potential voters and after 1860, the number
of age-eligible citizens who are potential voters for every year in which
there were statewide elections; 2. The number of votes cast overall and
for each major party and for those who voted but for neither major
party in each state and for the offices of president, governor, U.S. Senator
(after 1912) and aggregate statewide vote for U.S. House of Representatives
in general elections since 1788 and primaries (except for House) after
1902; and 3. The percentage of the eligible potential voters who ballots
for each of the offices and parties. The book provides graphs illustrating
the voting trends over the whole range of years, but it also is divided
into chapters covering twenty-year periods. In addition to the detailed
charts in each category by state and nation, each chapter provides graphs
covering the overall and partisan trends for each 20-year period, the major
changes in voting law via Constitutional Amendment, law and court decision
(thanks in major part to the work of Alexander Keyysar), the major events
occurring during each period and the votes and percentage of eligible votes
cast for each candidate for president who received votes in excess of one-percent
of the eligible vote. The book will be available in hard cover (907 pp.),
online in accessible (xls) format and in pdf for e-readers. (The attached
flier can provide some detail.)
One
methodological note: For elections after 1860, the book uses the methodology
that Walter Dean Burnham pioneered for ascertaining the number of eligible
citizens – taking figures from the decennial Census for age eligible population,
subtracting the age-eligible non-citizens and interpolating between Censuses
based on rate of change over each 10 year period, readjusting for any changes
in rate provided by the ensuing Census. Burnham interpolated from Census
to Census or, usually, from April to April of each election year. This
book carries the interpolation to November of each year and uses the November
figure for the statistical analysis of general elections while using the
Burnham approach for the analysis of primaries, the majority of which occur
in spring and summer. The book explicitly does not use the VEP figures
that have been developed by others because there is no data for many of
the elements of VEP other than non-citizens for most of the range of years
covered by this book, rendering VEP useless for this type of analysis.
(I would also argue and have that VEP – even in the present – is
a necessarily flawed figure because it selectively and not comprehensively
uses only some of the elements that affect an accurate picture of the eligible
vote – partly because some of the needed figures are unavailable -- and
that by eliminating non-citizens one corrects for the major distorting
factor in the age-eligible figure that Census provides and had been in
widespread use. But that is a theological argument about which others can
render their own judgment.)
Some
additional information is available from CQ Press at this url: http://www.cqpress.com/product/Voter-Turnout-in-the-United-States-1788.html
Curtis Gans, Director
Center for the Study of the American Electorate
Center for Democracy and Election Management
American University
3201 New Mexico Avenue NW
Suite 395
Washington, DC 20016-8026
Phones: (202) 885-6295 (o); (703) 304-1283 (c), (540) 822-5292 (h)
Fax: (202) 885-6294
e-mail: gans@american.edu; curtis.gans@gmail.com
Website: http://www.American.edu/ia/cdem/csae