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The Examiner reports that voter turnout in the metro area last week was not historically high. The DCBOEE was predicting about 63 percent voter turnout this year in the District once all absentee votes were counted. In 1984, when Walter Mondale was running for president, voter turnout in D.C. was up at 77 percent. Virginia and Maryland similarly fell short of setting records this year. That seems pretty weird, considering the long lines we saw at many precincts early in the morning. What could explain the disparity? Seems like a lot of this year's enthusiastic voters voted first thing in the morning, and that rain in the evening on Tuesday might have kept people away after work; lines at most polling places after 10:30 a.m. or so were virtually nonexistent.
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I have been wondering about this too, since just about every article about the election took it as gospel that turnout was "recordbreaking". This was particularly curious, since turnout numbers normally take days if not weeks to calculate. And to the extent they have estimates, what "record" are they talking about? Is "highest turnout since an even higher turnout" count as a record?
I understand the press was dying to gush, but it seems like it got sloppy on this point.
"What could explain the disparity?"
The percentage of registered voters that voted this year is bound to a much larger number of actual voters standing in line than even a greater percentage of registed voters in previous years.
More people were eligible to vote this year than in previous years, and more people were registered to vote this year than in previous years.
there have been a lot of questions about names on the registration lists in DC too. like, they haven't been purged of people who are dead or who don't live here anymore, so that would keep the percentage of voters who participated artificially low.
IMGoph That's not all. Some people register when getting their drivers license and again by mail. Or they might re-register instead of correcting a new or misspelled name. They end up on the rolls twice, often with a slight difference in their name (e.g., middle initial on one, middle name spelled out on another). The Board of Elections seems to err on the side of leaving both names on instead of cleaning them up.
Everybody wants to believe they are living through a historic moment, a record-breaking event, one for the history books! They also say there's never been an election more important, voters more engaged and interested, and on and on. The fact of the matter is this happens more often than anyone cares to think, but because this thing got played up and up over the course of two years, now everyone is shocked when the reality doesn't meet the expectation. Go figure.
The problem is the data used by the DC Board of Elections and the Examiner is faulty. Turnout as a percentage of registered voters does not provide an accurate picture. Registration numbers are a poor denominator because election administration of voter rolls varies greatly between states and even within states and varies over time - essentially not comparing apples to apples when using registration data. Also, voter registration does not capture the total number of people actually eligible to vote including the millions of unregistered citizens. A more accurate turnout picture is given when using estimates of the voting eligible population. Data found here - http://elections.gmu.edu/preliminary_vote_2008.html - estimates that turnout in DC was around 57 percent of the voting eligible population which could well be a record for the city.