Up to 121 million people will vote, compared with 105 million in 2000, according to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. That would be 60 percent of eligible voters, the highest percentage since 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when 61.9 percent of eligible voters went to the polls.
A heavy turnout probably hurts Bush, said Larry Sabato, who runs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics in Charlottesville, Virginia.
”If this turnout goes about 120 million, which it might, he’s gone,” Sabato said. ”That many new people are not showing up to say, `Good job, Mr. President.”’
The Writer’s Almanac – NOVEMBER 1 – 7, 2004
Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, school board members, and of course, the President. Generally between fifty and fifty-five percent of eligible voters actually vote in each presidential election year. There have only been four presidential elections in the last seventy years that inspired more than sixty percent of eligible Americans to vote: 1952, 1960, 1964, and 1968. The lowest turn out in the last seventy years was in 1924, with 48%. Turn out in 1996 was the second lowest, with 49%.
But the lowest turn out in the history of American elections was the first federal election under the US Constitution, held in 1788. Only eleven percent of eligible voters voted in that first election. To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. But different states had trouble defining what a property owner was.