Us voter turnout recently soared but lags behind many peer countries

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US voter turnout recently soared but lags behind many peer countries Pew Research Center

04.01.2023, 16:46
US voter turnout recently soared but lags behind many peer countries | Pew Research Center
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/01/turnout-in-u-s-has-soared-in-recent-elections-but-by-some-measures-still-trails-that-of-many-ot…
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The Center examined the most recent nationwide election results for 50 countries, mostly
with highly developed economies and solid democratic traditions. The clear turnout
champion was Uruguay: In the second, decisive round of that nation’s 2019 presidential
election, 94.9% of the estimated voting-age population and 90.1% of registered voters cast
ballots.
Uruguay’s voting-age turnout was followed by Turkey (89% in the 2018 presidential
election) and Peru (83.6% in last year’s presidential election). All five countries with the
highest voting-age turnout have presidential, as opposed to parliamentary, systems of
government, and four of the five have – and enforce – laws making
voting compulsory
.
In Switzerland, by contrast, just 36.1% of the voting-age population turned out in the 2019
parliamentary elections, the lowest among the 50 countries in our analysis. But that may
have less to do with voter apathy than with demographics: More than a quarter of
Switzerland’s permanent resident population (25.7%) are
foreign nationals
, and hence
ineligible to vote in Swiss elections
.
When turnout is calculated as a share of registered voters, Swiss turnout rises to 45.1% –
still the second-lowest among the 50 countries we examined. In Luxembourg, by
comparison, changing the metric makes a dramatic difference: The tiny country’s voting-
age turnout was just 48.2% in its 2018 parliamentary election, but 89.7% of registered
voters went to the polls. Why?
Nearly half
of the population (47.1%) are foreigners.
Those examples illustrate how turnout comparisons between countries are seldom clean
and often tricky. Another complicating factor, besides demographics, is how countries
register their voters.
In many countries, the national government takes the lead in getting people’s names on
the voter rolls – whether by registering them automatically once they become eligible (as
in, for example,
Sweden
or
Japan
) or by aggressively encouraging them to do so (as in
the
United Kingdom
). In such countries, there’s often little difference in turnout rates
among registered voters and the voting-age population as a whole.
In other countries – notably the United States – it’s largely up to individual voters to
register themselves. And the U.S. is unusual in that voter registration is not the job of a
single national agency, but of individual states, counties and cities. That means the rules
can
vary considerably
depending on where a would-be voter lives.
It also means there’s no single, authoritative source for how many people are registered to
vote in the U.S. The
Census Bureau
estimates that in 2020, 168.3 million people were
registered to vote in 2020 – or at least said they were. Even so, that figure represents only
about two-thirds of the total voting-age population (66.7%) and 72.7% of citizens of voting
age. By comparison, 91.8% of the UK’s voting-age population was registered to vote in that

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