Title: Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections | The American Presidency Project
Headings: Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections
Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections
Please see Notes below.
Notes
Source (s)

Content: Registered voters counts the total number of eligible people who have taken the additional step of actually registering to vote. We report here the estimates produced by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. This revised table no longer reports registration totals before 1968, consistent with recent CPS publications. Registration was not a universal requirement until “well into the twentieth century” (Ansolabhere and Konisky) and some states did not impose uniform registration requirements until the 1970s. As of 2016, North Dakota had no registration requirement. So it is possible for the number of votes to exceed the number of registered voters. Scholars point out that census data may not be entirely accurate (see Bennett 1990). A data source that may be of interest to many is the U.S. Election Assistance Commission which surveys county-level officials about voting and elections. Among their data is a series reporting the total number of persons "registered and eligible to vote." For 2016, the sum of the individual county numbers, for counties with data in the US is 185,714,229--a number 15% greater than the CPS estimate for the same year and election.