As of November 2020, 66.8 percent of the eligible voting population in the United States voted in the 2020 presidential election. Voter turnout was highest in New Jersey and Minnesota.

Throughout United States history, voter turnout among the voting eligible population has varied, ranging from below twelve percent in uncontested elections, to 83 percent in the 1876 election. In early years, turnout in presidential elections was relatively low, as the popular vote was not used in every state to decide who electors would vote for. When this was changed in the 1824 election, turnout increased dramatically, and generally fluctuated between seventy and eighty percent during the second half of the nineteenth century. Until the 1840 and 1842 elections, midterm elections also had a higher turnout rate than their corresponding presidential elections, although this trend has been reversed since these years.

Declining turnout in the twentieth century An increase in voting rights, particularly for black males in 1870 and for women in 1920, has meant that the share of the total population who are legally eligible to vote has increased significantly; yet, as the number of people eligible to vote increased, the turnout rate generally decreased. Following enfranchisement, it would take over fifty years before the female voter turnout would reach the same level as males, and over 150 years before black voters would have a similar turnout rate to whites. A large part of this was simply the lack of a voting tradition among these voter bases; however, the Supreme Court and lawmakers across several states (especially in the south) created obstacles for black voters and actively enforced policies and practices that disenfranchised black voter participation. These practices were in place from the end of the Reconstruction era (1876) until the the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally removed and prohibited many of these obstacles; nonetheless, people of color continue to be disproportionally affected by voting restrictions to this day.

Recent decades In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the minimum voting age in most states from 21 to 18 years old, which greatly contributed to the six and eight percent reductions in voter turnout in the 1972 and 1974 elections respectively, highlighting a distinct correlation between age and voter participation. Overall turnout remained below sixty percent from the 1970s until the 2004 election, and around forty percent in the corresponding midterms. In recent elections, increased political involvement among younger voters and those from ethnic minority backgrounds has seen these numbers rise, with turnout in the 2018 midterms reaching fifty percent. This was the highest midterm turnout in over one hundred years, leading many at the time to predict that the 2020 election would see one of the largest and most diverse voter turnouts in the past century, although these predictions then reversed with the arival of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. However, 2020 did prove to have the highest turnout in any presidential election since 1900; largely as a result of mail-in voting, improved access to early voting, and increased activism among grassroots organizations promoting voter registration.

Since 1964, voter turnout rates in U.S. presidential elections have generally fluctuated across all age groups, falling to a national low in 1996, before rising again in the past two decades. Since 1988, there has been a direct correlation with voter participation and age, as people become more likely to vote as they get older. Participation among eligible voters under the age of 25 is the lowest of all age groups, and in the 1996 and 2000 elections, fewer than one third of eligible voters under the age of 25 participated, compared with more than two thirds of voters over 65 years.

This dataset contains counts of voter registration and voter turnout for all counties in the United States for the years 2004-2022. It also contains measures of each county's Democratic and Republican partisanship, including six-year longitudinal partisan indices for 2006-2022.

Voter turnout is a crucial indicator of democratic health, yet forecasting turnout remains an understudied area in political science. This article presents two pioneering models for predicting U.S. presidential election turnout: The National Model and The State Model. The National Model, using data from 1868-2020, employs lagged turnout as its sole predictor. The State Model, covering 1984-2020, incorporates demographic and institutional variables to forecast state-level participation. The National Model predicts 65.3% turnout for 2024, while the State Model forecasts increased turnout in 41 states compared to 2020. The models' ability to generate early predictions offers valuable lead time for planning and resource allocation, which has implications for election administrators and political campaigns as well as for the vibrancy of civic engagement in America.

United States presidential elections are quadrennial elections that decide who will be the President and Vice President of the United States for the next four years. Voter turnout has ranged between 54 and 70 percent since 1964, with white voters having the highest voter turnout rate (particularly when those of Hispanic descent are excluded). In recent decades, turnout among black voters has got much closer to the national average, and in 2008 and 2012, the turnout among black voters was higher than the national average, exceeded only by non-Hispanic white voters; this has been attributed to Barack Obama's nomination as the Democratic nominee in these years, where he was the first African American candidate to run as a major party's nominee. Turnout among Asian and Hispanic voters is much lower than the national average, and turnout has even been below half of the national average in some elections. This has been attributed to a variety of factors, such as the absence of voting tradition in some communities or families, the concentration of Asian and Hispanic communities in urban (non-swing) areas, and a disproportionate number of young people (who are less likely to vote).

In the 1824 U.S presidential election, which was the first where a popular vote was used to determine the overall winner, approximately three percent of the U.S. population voted in the election, while only one percent actually voted for the winner. Over the following decades, restrictions that prevented non-property owning males from voting were gradually repealed, and almost all white men over the age of 21 could vote by the 1856 election. The next major development was the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution following the American Civil War, which granted suffrage to all male citizens of voting age, regardless of race. Turnout then grew to almost twenty percent at the turn of the century, however Jim Crow laws played a large part in keeping these numbers lower than they potentially could have been, by disenfranchising black communities in the south and undoing much of the progress made during the Reconstruction Era. Extension of voting rights Female suffrage, granted to women in 1920, was responsible for the largest participation increase between any two elections in U.S. history. Between the 1916 and 1920 elections, overall turnout increased by almost seven percent, and it continued to grow to 38 percent by the 1940 election; largely due to the growth in female participation over time. Following a slight reduction during the Second World War and 1948 elections, turnout remained at between 36 and forty percent from the 1950s until the 1990s. Between these decades, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971 respectively re-enfranchised many black voters in the south and reduced the voting age in all states from 21 to 18 years old. Participation among female voters has also exceeded male participation in all elections since 1980. Recent trends The 1992 election was the first where more than forty percent of the total population cast ballots, and turnout has been above forty percent in all presidential elections since 2004. Along with the extension of voting rights, the largest impact on voter turnout has been the increase in life expectancy throughout the centuries, almost doubling in the past 150 years. As the overall average age has risen, so too has the share of the total population who are eligible to vote, and older voters have had the highest turnout rates since the 1980s. Another factor is increased political involvement among ethnic minorities; while white voters have traditionally had the highest turnout rates in presidential elections, black voters turnout has exceeded the national average since 2008. Asian and Hispanic voter turnouts have also increased in the past twenty years, with the growing Hispanic vote in southern and border states expected to cause a major shift in U.S. politics in the coming decades.

In terms of the most popular presidents, in the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to have been elected by more than one fifth of the total population. Three presidents were elected by more than 22 percent of the total population, respectively Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Barack Obama in 2008, while Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984 saw him become the only president in U.S. history to win with the support of more than 23 percent of the total population. While the vote count for the 2020 election is still to be finalized, President-elect Joe Biden has already received 81.28 million votes as of December 02, which would also translate to over 24.5 percent of the total population, and will likely near 25 percent by the end of the counting process.

The ANES 2020-2022 Social Media Study was a two-wave survey before and after the 2020 presidential election and a third survey following the 2022 midterm elections in the United States. Data from these surveys are available as a public use file from the American National Election Studies (ANES) website. The three questionnaires have largely the same content, affording repeated measures of the same constructs. The questionnaire covers voter turnout and candidate choice in the 2020 presidential primaries and general election, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, feeling thermometers, feelings about how things are going in the country, trust in institutions, political knowledge and misinformation, political participation, political stereotyping, political diversity of social networks, and campaign/policy issues including health insurance, immigration, guns, and climate change.

Electoral registrations for parliamentary and local government elections as recorded in electoral registers for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In the 2016 presidential election, turnout among those aged 45 to 64 years reached its lowest level, at less than 62 percent, but it then rose above 65 percent in 2020. White voters in this age bracket have had the highest turnout rate in all of these elections, especially white voters of non-Hispanic origin; except for the 2012 election where Black voters had the highest turnout rate. As with other age groups, Asian American and Hispanic voters traditionally have much lower turnout rates, often around half of the national average for those in the 45 to 64 age bracket.

Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders. This news and opinion are often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily, such as political parties, factions, or interest groups. But how does exposure to cross-border information affect the diffusion of ideas across national and ideological borders? Here, we develop a non-linear mathematical model for the cross-border spread of two ideologies. First, we describe the standard deterministic model where the populations of each country are assumed to be constant and homogeneously mixed. We solve the system of differential equations numerically by the Runge-Kutta method and show how small changes in the influence of a minority ideology can trigger shifts in the global political equilibrium. Second, we simulate recruitment as a stochastic differential process for each political affiliation and fit model solutions to population growth rates and voting populations in US presidential elections from 1932 to 2020. We also project the dynamics of several possible scenarios from 2020 to the end of the century. We show that cross-border influence plays a fundamental role in determining election outcomes. An increase in foreign support for a national party’s ideas could change the election outcome, independent of domestic recruitment capacity. One key finding of our study suggests that voter turnout in the US will grow at a faster rate than non-voters in the coming decades. This trend is attributed to the enhanced recruitment capabilities of both major parties among non-partisans over time, making political disaffection less prominent. This phenomenon holds true across all simulated scenarios.

In 2024, there were 173.85 million people registered to vote in the United States. This is an increase from the previous election, when 161.42 million people were registered to vote. Voting requirements While voting laws differ from state to state, the basic requirements are the same across the entire country. People are allowed to vote in elections in the United States if they are a U.S. citizen, meet their state’s residency requirements, are at least 18 years old before Election Day, and are registered to vote before the registration deadline. Vote early and often Generally, younger people are not registered to vote at the same rate as older individuals. Additionally, young people tend not to vote as much as older people, particularly in midterm elections. However, in the 2016 presidential election, a significant number of people across all age groups voted in the election, resulting in a high voter turnout.

According to exit polling in ten key states of the 2024 presidential election in the United States, 46 percent of voters with a 2023 household income of 30,000 U.S. dollars or less reported voting for Donald Trump. In comparison, 51 percent of voters with a total family income of 100,000 to 199,999 U.S. dollars reported voting for Kamala Harris.

In February 2020, 40.7 percent of respondents stated that they would vote for the National Liberal Party (PNL) in the general elections in Romania in 2020. The second party with the most votes was the Social Democratic Party (PSD). The least popular was the Freedom, Unity and Solidarity Party (PLUS) with only 3.5 percent of the vote.

The 1860 election cemented the Republican Party's position as one of the two major parties in U.S. politics, along with the already-established Democratic Party. Since this time, all U.S. presidents have been affiliated with these two parties, and their candidates have generally performed the best in each presidential election. In spite of this two-party dominance, there have always been third-party or independent candidates running on the ballot, either on a nationwide, regional or state level. No third-party candidate has ever won a U.S. election, although there have been several occasions where they have carried states or split the vote with major party candidates. Today, the largest third-party in U.S. politics is the Libertarian Party, who are considered to be socially liberal, but economically conservative; in the 2016 election, their nominee, Gary Johnson, secured just over three percent of the popular vote, while their latest candidate, Jo Jorgenson, received just over one percent of the vote in the 2020 election.

Theodore Roosevelt The most successful third-party nominee was Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election, who was the only third-party candidate to come second in a U.S. election. The former president had become disillusioned with his successor's growing conservatism, and challenged the incumbent President Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. Roosevelt proved to be the most popular candidate in the primaries, however Taft had already secured enough Republican delegates in the south to seal the nomination. Roosevelt then used this split in the Republican Party to form his own, Progressive Party, and challenged both major party candidates for the presidency (even taking a bullet in the process). In the end, Roosevelt carried six states, and won over 27 percent of the popular vote, while Taft carried just two states with 23 percent of the vote; this split in the Republican Party allowed the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, to win 82 percent of the electoral votes despite only winning 42 percent of the popular vote.

Other notable performances The last third-party candidate to win electoral votes was George Wallace* in the 1968 election. The Democratic Party had been the most popular party in the south since before the Civil War, however their increasingly progressive policies in the civil rights era alienated many of their southern voters. Wallace ran on a white supremacist and pro-segregationist platform and won the popular vote in five states. This was a similar story to that of Storm Thurmond, twenty years earlier.

In the 1992 election, Independent candidate Ross Perot received almost one fifth of the popular vote. Although he did not win any electoral votes, Perot split the vote so much that he prevented either Clinton or Bush Sr. from winning a majority in any state except Arkansas (Clinton's home state). Perot ran again in 1996, but with less than half the share of votes he received four years previously; subsequent studies and polls have shown that Perot took an equal number of votes from both of the major party candidates in each election.

In the UK's general election of 2024 voter turnout was estimated to have been 60 percent, the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4 percent. Between 1922 and 1997 voter turnout never fell below 70 percent, but in 2001 it dropped to just 59.4 percent. Since that low point, voter turnout has gradually recovered and reached 72.2 percent in the Brexit Referendum of 2016, which is still some way off the peak of 83.9 percent recorded in the 1950 General Election. The trend of low voter turnouts in recent times is also reflected in the European elections, which had its lowest voter turnout in 2014 at 42.61 percent. Labour rides wave of discontent to power in 2024 Labour's victory in the 2024 general election was broadly anticipated, with Keir Starmer's party enjoying a comfortable lead in opinion polls from late 2021 onwards. This gap widened further during Liz Truss' short time as Prime Minister, following an acute economic crisis in late 2022 which saw her resign after just 44 days, and propel Rishi Sunak to power. Although Sunak restored a degree of stability after the reigns of his predecessors, Johnson and Truss, he ultimately failed to convince the public he could address the main issues facing the country. By the time of the election, Labour was seen as being more competent on the economy, immigration, and healthcare, the three major issues for voters on the eve of the election. Among prospective Labour voters, the main reason for almost half of people intending to vote for them was to "get the Tories out", compared with just five percent who agreed with their policies. A winter election in 2019 The irregular timing of the 2019 general election, which took place on December 12, 2019, was due to the political chaos caused by Brexit, and the failure of the UK to agree a deal to leave the European Union that year. The Conservatives won 365 seats in this election, achieving a large enough majority to get their Brexit deal approved in the House of Commons after three and a half years of political chaos. Although the Conservatives then led the polls throughout much of 2020 and 2021, their popularity proceeded to sink considerably, especially due to Boris Johnson's alleged involvement in a number of political scandals, particularly that of "partygate". Following an avalanche of resignations from his government, Johnson himself resigned on July 7, 2022, paving the way for Truss to succeed him a few months later

In Sweden, voter turnout has traditionally been high. Since the 1970s, when a unicameral parliament was introduced in the country, the voter rate has never been lower than 80 percent. There was a gradual decrease in the turnout from 1982 to 2002, but has since increased, reaching 87.2 percent in the 2018 election, before falling slightly in 2022. In recent years, this was one of the highest voter turnouts worldwide.

As of 2020, Georgia has taken part in every presidential election contested in the United States, apart from the 1864 election, when Georgia was a member of the Confederacy. In these 58 elections, Georgia has voted for the winning candidate 34 times, giving a success rate of 59 percent. As with most southern states, Georgia has traditionally voted for the more conservative candidate of the major parties; primarily voting Democrat in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, before switching to the Republican Party in the 1960s (although it was considered a swing state in the 1970s and 1980s). Major party candidates have won the popular vote in Georgia in every elections, except in 1968 when George Wallace of the American Independent Party carried the state. Georgia has voted for the Democratic nominee 34 times, including every possible election from 1852 until 1960, and the Republican nominee on ten occasions, including all elections from 1996 to 2016. In the 2020 election, however, Georgia proved to have one of the closest counts nationwide, with Democratic nominee Joe Biden eventually flipping the state by a 0.2 percent margin after several recounts.

Exceptions As previously mentioned, Georgia has predominantly voted Republican since the 1960s, however it did vote for the Democratic nominee in both the 1976 and 1980 elections. In these elections, Georgia native Jimmy Carter carried his home state with over two thirds of the vote in 1976, and defeated Republican favorite Ronald Reagan by 15 percent in 1980. As of 2020, Jimmy Carter is the only Georgia native to have ascended to the presidency, while John C. Frémont, who was the Republican nominee in 1856, is the only other major party nominee to have been born in Georgia. The only other times where Georgia voted Democrat since the 1960s were in 1992, where Bill Clinton defeated the incumbent President George H. W. Bush by just 0.6 percent of the popular vote (this was the closest result of any state in this election) and, as previously mentioned, in 2020 (which, again, was the closest result of any state in this election, along with Arizona). The swing in 2020 has been attributed to increased voter registration and turnout among urban and suburban voters, as a result of Democratic grassroots organizations; as well as the unpopularity of restrictive healthcare policies implemented by the Republican administration within the state.

Electoral votes

Georgia's allocation of electoral votes has generally increased over the past 230 years, with some fluctuation. It has grown from just four votes in the 1800 election, to sixteen votes in 2012; along with Michigan, this is the eighth-highest allocation in the country, contributing to Georgia's position as one of the most influential states in the 2020 election.

The state of Michigan has taken part in 47 U.S. presidential elections, correctly voting for the nationwide winner in 37 of these, giving a success rate of 79 percent. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Michigan generally voted for the Republican Party's nominee, although it has regularly swung between the two major parties since the 1930s. The only time when the Wolverine State voted for a third party candidate was in the 1912 election, when former President Theodore Roosevelt carried Michigan while running as the Progressive Party's nominee. While born in Nebraska, Gerald R. Ford was raised, studied and represented Michigan in Congress, before he became the only Michiganian to ascend to the presidency following Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.

Swing state After voting for the Democratic candidate in all elections from 1992 until 2012, the Republican nominee Donald Trump carried the state in the 2016 election, with just a 0.23 percent larger share of the popular votes than Hillary Clinton. Trump's victory has been attributed to a large number of working class voters who traditionally voted Democrat, but had become disenfranchised with the party during the Obama presidency. In the 2020 election, however, increased turnout among black voters and stronger appeal to unionized workers saw Joe Biden swing Michigan blue again, with a seven percent margin in the popular vote.

Michigan demographics Michigan was designated three electoral votes in the 1836 election (despite not being admitted to the union until 1837), and over the next 130 years its allocation grew to 21 votes. This came as a result of Michigan's significant population growth and positive net migration rate in mid-1900s, which was largely due to the expansion of the automotive industry in the Detroit area. Since the 1970s, job automation and increased competition have substantially weakened the industry's employment opportunities; therefore Michigan's population growth has slowed significantly, and its number of electoral votes has also decreased to just 16. This number is expected to drop to 15 in the 2024 election.

In 2020, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) obtained most of its presidential votes (84.8 percent of votes cast in the region) from the Volta region of Ghana, while the New Patriotic Party (NPP) won most votes (71. percent) from the Ashanti region. Over time, these two regions have been the political strongholds of the two parties. Furthermore, during the 2020 elections, around 6.79 million votes were accumulated by the (NPP), while approximately 6.17 million votes (47.2 percent of all votes) were won by the NDC. Overall, elections are held in Ghana every four years.