In 2022, there were 161.42 million people registered to vote in the United States. This is a decrease from the previous election, when 168.31 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.

As of late October 2024, young voter registration is lagging across a number of states when compared to the number registered on Election Day 2020. However, voter registration in swing states Michigan and Nevada increased by over 11 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds.

As of December 7, 2020, 66.7 percent of the eligible voting population in the United States voted in the 2020 presidential election. As of this date, voter turnout was highest in Minnesota, at 80 percent.

The Voter Participation indicator presents voter turnout in Champaign County as a percentage, calculated using two different methods.

In the first method, the voter turnout percentage is calculated using the number of ballots cast compared to the total population in the county that is eligible to vote. In the second method, the voter turnout percentage is calculated using the number of ballots cast compared to the number of registered voters in the county.

Since both methods are in use by other agencies, and since there are real differences in the figures that both methods return, we have provided the voter participation rate for Champaign County using each method.

Voter participation is a solid illustration of a community’s engagement in the political process at the federal and state levels. One can infer a high level of political engagement from high voter participation rates.

The voter participation rate calculated using the total eligible population is consistently lower than the voter participation rate calculated using the number of registered voters, since the number of registered voters is smaller than the total eligible population.

There are consistent trends in both sets of data: the voter participation rate, no matter how it is calculated, shows large spikes in presidential election years (e.g., 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020) and smaller spikes in intermediary even years (e.g., 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022). The lowest levels of voter participation can be seen in odd years (e.g., 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023).

This data primarily comes from the election results resources on the Champaign County Clerk website. Election results resources from Champaign County include the number of ballots cast and the number of registered voters. The results are published frequently, following each election.

Data on the total eligible population for Champaign County was sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, using American Community Survey (ACS) 1-Year Estimates for each year starting in 2005, when the American Community Survey was created. The estimates are released annually by the Census Bureau.

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of providing the standard 1-year data products, the Census Bureau released experimental estimates from the 1-year data in 2020. This includes a limited number of data tables for the nation, states, and the District of Columbia. The Census Bureau states that the 2020 ACS 1-year experimental tables use an experimental estimation methodology and should not be compared with other ACS data. For these reasons, and because this data is not available for Champaign County, the eligible voting population for 2020 is not included in this Indicator.

For interested data users, the 2020 ACS 1-Year Experimental data release includes datasets on Population by Sex and Population Under 18 Years by Age.

Sources: Champaign County Clerk Historical Election Data; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2023 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using data.census.gov; (10 October 2024).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2022 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using data.census.gov; (5 October 2023).; Champaign County Clerk Historical Election Data; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2021 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using data.census.gov; (7 October 2022).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2019 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using data.census.gov; (8 June 2021).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2018 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using data.census.gov; (8 June 2021).; Champaign County Clerk Election History; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (13 May 2019).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2016 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (13 May 2019).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (6 March 2017).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2014 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2013 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2012 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2011 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2010 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2009 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2008 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2007 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2006 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey, 2005 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table B05003; generated by CCRPC staff; using American FactFinder; (15 March 2016).

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.

Reference data of distribution of registered voters by Election Committee subsectors in 2020 (Simplified Chinese)

2020 Detailed Voter Registration and Turnout Data

In 2022, 77.9 percent of people aged between 65 and 74 years old were registered to vote in the United States - the highest share of any age group. In comparison, 49.1 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds were registered to vote in that year.

As of November 2020, 45 percent of respondents said they voted for the Democratic Party candidate in the district they live in during the 2020 election for the House of Representatives.

In U.S. presidential elections since 1964, voter turnout among male and female voters has changed gradually but significantly, with women consistently voting at a higher rate than men since the 1980 election. 67 percent of eligible female voters took part in the 1964 election, compared to 72 percent of male voters. This difference has been reversed in recent elections, where the share of women who voted has been larger than the share of men by around four percent since 2004.

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

This dataset was used to conduct the NYC Campaign Finance Board's voter participation research, published in the 2019-2020 Voter Analysis Report. Each row contains information about an active voter in 2018 and their voting history dating back to 2008, along with geographical information from their place of residence for each year they were registered voters. Because this dataset contains only active voters in the year 2018, this dataset cannot be used to calculate election turnout.

Reference data of age and sex profile of registered electors by Districts in 2020 (English)

During a June 2020 survey, registered voters in the United States were asked whether they are more or less enthusiastic about voting in the upcoming elections than those of previous years. Among the respondents, 45 percent decided that yes, this year excited them more than those of the past. This outweighed the survey participants that felt less enthusiastic about voting in this year's election.

In 2020 most Ghanaians who had registered to vote were between the ages of 18 and 35 (approximately 9.4 million people), and this included over 2.6 million first time voters. Voters from age 36 to 45 added up to around 3.3 million people. The least group of people who had registered to vote were those aged 75 years and older. Overall in Ghana as of 2020, there were over 17 million valid voters with a female majority.

Reference data of age and sex profile of registered electors by Districts in 2020 (Traditional Chinese)

Reference data of age and sex profile of registered electors of the Southern District Council Constituencies in 2020

This repo contains the data introduced in

Immer, A.*, Kristof, V.*, Grossglauser, M., Thiran, P., Sub-Matrix Factorization for Real-Time Vote Prediction, KDD 2020

These data have been collected from OpenData.Swiss every two minutes on two different referendum vote days: May 19, 2019, and February 9, 2020. We use these data to make real-time predictions of the referenda outcome on www.predikon.ch. We publish here the raw data, as retrieved in JSON format from the API. We also provide a python script to help scraping the JSON files.

After unzipping the datasets, you can scrape the data by referendum vote day by doing:

from scraper import scrape_referenda

Scrape the data from February 2, 2020.

data_dir = 'path/to/2020-02-09' data = scrape_referenda(data_dir)

The data variable will be a list of datum dictionaries of the following structure:

{ "vote": 6290, "municipality": 1, "timestamp": "2020-02-09T15:23:10", "num_yes": 222, "num_no": 482, "num_valid": 704, "num_total": 709, "num_eligible": 1407, "yes_percent": 0.3153409090909091, "turnout": 0.503909026297086 }

The datum is as follows:

vote: vote ID as defined by OpenData.Swiss

municipality: municipality ID as defined by OpenData.Swiss

timestamp: date and time at which the JSON files has been published on OpenData.Swiss

num_yes: number of "yes" in the municipality

num_no: number of "no" in the municipality

num_valid: number of valid ballots (the ones counting for the results)

numb_total: total number of ballots (including invalid ones)

num_eligible: number of registered voters

yes_percent: percentage of "yes" (computed as num_yes / num_valid)

turnout: turnout to the vote (computed as num_total / num_eligible)

Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions!

To cite this dataset:

@inproceedings{immer2020submatrix, author = {Immer, Alexander and Kristof, Victor and Grossglauser, Matthias and Thiran, Patrick}, title = {Sub-Matrix Factorization for Real-Time Vote Prediction}, year = {2020}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining}, }

During a June 2020 survey, registered voters in the United States were asked to describe their enthusiasm for the November 2020 general elections across all levels of office. The survey provided five options, from not at all enthusiastic to extremely enthusiastic. Among the respondents, a 44 percent majority showed an extremely enthusiastic outlook while only nine percent chose not at all enthusiastic.

Provides demographic information on persons who did and did not register to vote. Also measures number of persons who voted and reasons for not registering.