Transcript
MICHAEL McDONALD: And Larry very well described what's going on with the overall trends in turnout, but I wanted to just point out—because some people may have, this may be the first time that they've seen this information—why it's so important to contrast using the voting age population, which is the denominator that many people have used up until 2000 as the correct way of calculating turnout rates versus using something like the eligible population.
If you look at Figure 1 on that handout, you'll see that from 1972 through 2000 presidential elections using the voting eligible population or the voting age population as the denominator. What is the voting age population? If you go to the Census Bureau, it's something that the Census Bureau used to regularly report prior to an election so that we could get estimates of turnout, not just nationally, but in the States, and use this information.
They would produce a sex, age, race distribution so that pollsters could weight their surveys properly. And their documentation is very explicit. It says that this is everybody age 18 and older living inside the United States. And it excludes people like overseas citizens, and it includes people who aren't eligible to vote. The definition was sitting there for everybody to look at, but nobody really bothered to say, well, what might be the consequence of looking at those eligible versus those who are just age 18 and older.
Well, it turns out, since 1972, we have seen a flood of noncitizens come into the United States, and the calculation then of voting age population gradually became skewed as to a perception of what's going on in terms of turnout. And in 1972, we were looking at about 1.5 percent of the voting age population was not a citizen. By today, we're looking at almost 8 percent of the voting age population. And that 8 percent is not evenly distributed throughout the United States. It should come as no big surprise that most of it's located in California and other large metropolitan areas, other states. And if you look at California, for example, nearly 20 percent of its voting age population is ineligible to vote either because of the noncitizen question or the other trend that we've seen upwards from the 1980s, which is the number of ineligible felons, according to state law. Not all states have the same laws.
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