“The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on Earth,” Sanders said. He’s right that U.S. voter turnout is remarkably low compared to other developed nations. According to a
Pew Research Center report last year, just three of the other 33 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had lower turnout rates in their last national elections.
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U.S. turnout in 2012 was 53.6%, based on
129.1 million votes cast for president and an estimated voting-age population of just under
241 million people. Among OECD countries, the highest turnout rates were in Belgium (87.2%), Turkey (86.4%) and Sweden (82.6%). Switzerland consistently has the lowest turnout, with just 40% of the voting-age population casting ballots in the 2011 federal legislative elections, the most recent.
However, Belgium and Turkey are among the 28 nations around the world (and six in the OECD) where voting is compulsory, according to the
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. (One canton in Switzerland, also an OECD member nation, has compulsory voting.) While compulsory-voting laws aren’t always strictly enforced, their presence or absence can have dramatic impacts on turnout: Of the five highest-turnout OECD countries in recent elections, three have laws requiring their citizens to go to the polls and cast ballots. Conversely, turnout plunged in Chile after it moved from compulsory to voluntary voting in 2012 (and began automatically enrolling eligible citizens): from 87% of registered voters in the 2010 presidential election to 42% in 2013, even as the voter rolls swelled by 64%.
Chile’s situation points to yet another complicating factor: the distinction between who’s eligible to vote and who’s actually registered. In most countries, the government takes the lead in getting people’s names on the rolls – whether by registering them automatically once they become eligible (as in, for example, Sweden or Germany) or by aggressively seeking out and registering eligible voters (as in the U.K. and Australia). As a result, turnout looks pretty similar regardless of whether you’re looking at voting-age population or registered voters.
In the U.S., by contrast, registration is mainly an individual responsibility. And registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country: Only about 65% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 71% of the voting-age citizenry) is registered, according to the
Census Bureau, compared with 96% in Sweden and 93% in the U.K.
As a consequence, turnout comparisons based only on registered voters may not be very meaningful. For instance, U.S. turnout in 2012 was 84.3% of registered voters, a relatively lofty seventh among OECD countries. But registered voters here are a much more self-selected group, already more likely to vote because they took the trouble to register themselves.
There are even more ways to calculate turnout. Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who runs the United States Election Project,
estimates turnout as a share of the “voting-eligible population” (or VEP) by subtracting non-citizens and ineligible felons from the voting-age population, and adding eligible overseas voters. Using those calculations, U.S. turnout improves somewhat, to 58% of the 2012 voting-eligible population. However, comparable estimates aren’t available for other countries.
However measured, U.S. turnout rates have been fairly consistent over the past several decades, despite some election-to-election variation. Since 1980, voting-age turnout has varied within a 9-percentage-point range – from 48% in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected, to 57% in 2008, when Barack Obama won the White House. (Turnout, of course,
varies considerably among different racial, ethnic and age groups.)
U.S. voter turnout trails most developed countries
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