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Voter Turnout

by Ed Sawicki

This chart shows voter turnout as a percentage of the total population. It doesn't show the percentage compared to people of voting age or eligible voters because that data is not available for all the years shown. Aproximately 72 percent of the U.S. population are of voting age but not all of them are eligible to vote.

You can roughly approximate the percentage of people who voted compared to people of voting age by adding 28 to the percentages in the chart, but the result will not be accurate.

10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 1876 21.6 % 1876 1880 17.7 % 1884 18.0 1888 18.9 1892 17.0 1896 19.7 1896 1900 17.9 1904 15.5 1908 15.9 1912 10.3 1916 17.3 1916 1920 23.7 1924 21.1 1928 30.2 1932 30.9 1936 34.7 1936 1940 37.6 1944 34.4 1948 31.5 1952 39.0 1956 36.5 1956 1960 37.8 1964 36.6 1968 31.4 1972 36.4 1976 36.7 1976 1980 34.9 1984 39.0 1988 37.1 1992 32.8 1996 32.1 1996 2000 36.0 2004 41.3 2008 42.6 2012 39.5 2016 39.9 2016 2020 46.0 % of people voting

Nineteenth Amendment

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that gave women the right to vote was ratified by the requisite number of states in 1920. You see the percentage of people voting increase in the following years, except for the 1924 election.

The 2020 election had the highest level of voter turnout in history, at 46 percent of the population and about 74 percent of people of voting age.

Voter Disenfranchisement

Most U.S. states do not allow felons to vote and many states do not allow felons to vote after they've served their time in prison. The number of eligible voters in the country are the number of people of voting age minus those who are forbidden from voting because they are felons or former felons.