Another potential reason may be that wealthier people believe that they have more at stake if they don't vote than those with less resources or income. The historical trends in voter turnout in the United States presidential elections have been determined by the gradual expansion of voting rights from the initial restriction to white male property owners aged 21 or older in the early years of the country's independence, to all citizens aged 18 or older in the mid-20th century. Only less than 1.5 million Texans showed up for the 2014 constitutional amendment elections. There were 4 volunteer/observers working the polling place. Thus Wyoming was also the first full state to grant women the right to vote. Why young people don't vote. Retrieved from. AUSTIN — About 5.5 percent of Texans in the state's 15 biggest counties voted early this year. However, free black men lost voting rights in several states during this period. Give students a minute to share their ideas aloud. In all presidential elections prior to 1980, the voter turnout rate for women was lower than the rate for men. There is no one answer to why, all we can say is here is the effect.”. But those numbers trail off during non-presidential years and in primary races. Why do so few people vote? This article poses a multifaceted perspective on the effect of education levels on voter turnout. The graph of voter turnout percentages shows a dramatic decline in turnout over the first two decades of the twentieth century, ending in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the right to vote across the United States. McDonald, Michael, United States Elections Project. In 2013, only 1.1 million voted. In a 2001 article in the American Political Science Review, Michael P. McDonald and Samuel Popkin argued, that at least in the United States, voter turnout since 1972 has not actually declined when calculated for those eligible to vote, what they term the voting-eligible population. Harder and Krosnick (2008) contend that some of the reasons for this may be due to "differences in motivation or ability (sometimes both)" (Harder and Krosnick, 2008), or that less wealthy people have less energy, time, or resources to allot towards voting. The United States Elections Project, by Michael McDonald calculates VEP including citizenship and adjustments for felons. 2 of 5 Americans don’t vote in Presidential elections. In August, the Pew Research Center ranked the U.S. 31st out of 35 countries for voter turnout based on the voting age populace, among the mostly democratic nations that are a part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964..."[16] This gender gap has been a determining factor in several recent presidential elections, as women have been consistently about 15% more likely to support the candidate of the Democratic Party than the Republican candidate in each election since 1996. Michael D. Regan is an Associate Multimedia Producer for PBS NewsHour Weekend. In Rhode Island, the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s demonstrated that the demand for equal suffrage was broad and strong, although the subsequent reform included a significant property requirement for any resident born outside of the United States. The gradual expansion of the right to vote from only property-owning men to include all white men over 21 was an important movement in the period from 1800 to 1830. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 gave African American men the right to vote. According to Professor Jones, while voter turnout has been dropping, it's leveled off over the past couple of decades, and even saw a small uptick with the election of President Obama in 2008. Women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869, before the territory had become a full state in the union. Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. Moreover, Snyder's (2011) research suggests that students are more likely to vote than non-students. Thus, it can be surmised that those of younger ages may not be inclined to vote during elections. Here's a look at the makeup of the Texas electorate and some of the context for those turnout numbers. For example, a 1924 study of voter turnout in Chicago found that "female Chicagoans were far less likely to have visited the polls on Election Day than were men in both the 1920 presidential election (46% vs. 75%) and the 1923 mayoral contest (35% vs. The lowest voter turnout rate for a presidential race was in 1792, when electors from 15 states voted unanimously to re-elect George Washington for a second term. There were 459 cast during the early voting period, 959 on Election Day, and 15 by absentee vote. [20] Ineligible voters are not evenly distributed across the country, roughly 15% of California's voting-age population is ineligible to vote – which confounds comparisons of states. But two states known to be solid Democratic Party supporters – Hawaii and New York – also fall in the bottom 20 percent of turnout. An interview with Alexander Keyssar From the very founding of the United States, elites have worked to disenfranchise and suppress voters — because they know a mobilized electorate of workers and poor people would transform the country. 19–26. Voter turnout for constitutional amendments in Texas tends to be low because Most amendments face little opposition. Hawaii had the lowest voter turnout rate in the United States in 2008, with fewer than half of the eligible population casting ballots. Another correlated finding in his study (Snyder, 2011) was that education is less important as a predictor of voter turnout in states than tend to spend more on education. 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