elections are run not by a single national agency, as in many other advanced democracies, but by individual states and counties within states. voter turnout is one of those things that seems intuitively straightforward but in practice is anything but. (The Census Bureau typically releases a detailed report on registration and voting after every national election, but that’s not likely to come out for several months yet.) ![]() Given the continuing divides over the 2020 presidential election, we wanted to put the actual, verified turnout into some broader context. ![]() The past two months have been among the most turbulent post-election periods in American history, with unfounded but constantly repeated claims of voting fraud culminating in the Jan. Six of those states had recently adopted all-mail voting, either permanently (Utah and Hawaii) or for the 2020 elections only (California, New Jersey, Vermont and most of Montana). Turnout rates increased in every state compared with 2016, but of the 10 states where it rose the most, seven conducted November’s vote entirely or mostly by mail, our analysis shows. But another big factor was the dramatic steps many states took to expand mail balloting and early voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise in turnout was fueled in part by the bitter fight between incumbent President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden: A preelection survey found a record share of registered voters (83%) saying it “really matter” who won. ![]() Based on these measures, turnout was the highest since at least 1980, the earliest year in our analysis, and possibly much longer. 1, and the estimated voting-eligible population, which subtracts noncitizens and ineligible felons and adds overseas eligible citizens. Nationwide, presidential election turnout was about 7 percentage points higher than in 2016, regardless of which of three different turnout metrics we looked at: the estimated voting-age population as of July 1, that estimate adjusted to Nov.
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