Accurately tracking turnout rates is a challenge
Accurate information on who votes in the United States is crucial for evaluating the quality of our democracy. Every two years, a wide variety of actors use information about the composition of the electorate and the turnout rates of various groups to help explain elections – trying to determine both what happened as well as how a given election compares to previous elections.
However, all these estimates and the picture of the electorate they create have issues of one kind or another. Commonly cited estimates often exhibit one or more of these issues:
- Not available over long time periods
- Not available at the state level
- Not comparable over time or across states
- Have known inconsistencies or biases
- Based on proprietary data
- Based on opaque methodologies
We’re taking a different approach
Our new project attempts to address these issues: a set of transparent, methodologically robust, and comparable estimates based on publicly available data that document how turnout varies between groups, over geography, and over time. Our new estimates of turnout are:
- Based on publicly available data and has a fully transparent methodology
- Synthesize multiple sources of data, including the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration Supplement, election results, Census data, and validated voting data from the Cooperative Election Study.
- Able to generates estimates for major demographic subgroups at the state-level
- Comparable over many elections – going from 1980 to the present
- Incorporating uncertainty into all the outputs in a way that reflects the uncertainty of data
In the coming months, we plan to release more findings from the project along with a variety of datasets that scholars, journalists, and advocates can use to examine historical trends in turnout.
Resources
Research Team
- Davin Caughey, Class of 1949 Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Jenny Enos, Democracy Fund
- Bernard Fraga, Ann and Michael Hankin Distinguished Professor, Emory University
- Robert Griffin, Democracy Fund
- Chris Warshaw, Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University