Voter turnout in 2024
By 
With final numbers now in, it’s possible to calculate fairly precisely how many Americans bothered to vote in the 2024 election, and how many couldn’t vote for one reason or another.
If we imagine a room with 100 people in it who reflect the population as a whole:
22 of them couldn’t vote because they were too young.
Six of them couldn’t vote because they weren’t citizens.
One couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction.
So note that nearly 30% of the residents of the US at the moment aren’t even eligible to vote.
Of those who were eligible to vote, only 63.88% did so. This means that only 45.8% of the population voted.
Going back to our white room with black curtains:
26 out of 100 people in it didn’t vote even though they could have.
22 out of 100 people voted for Kamala Harris.
23 out of 100 voted for Donald Trump.
1 person voted for somebody other than Harris or Trump for president.
1 person voted but didn’t vote for president.
Going back to the VOTER ELIGIBLE POPULATION (note that 21 million American adults aren’t eligible to vote), some particularly bad turnout numbers as a percentage of the voter eligible population in those states:
West Virginia: 55.5%
Texas: 56.6%
Oklahoma: 53.3%
New York: 57.9%
Mississippi: 57.5^
Hawaii: 50.3%
Arkansas: 53.5%
Some relatively good states:
Colorado: 73.1%. (All-mail voting)
Maine: 74.2%
Michigan: 74.6%
Minnesota: 76.4%
New Hampshire: 74.1%
Pennsylvania: 71.4%
Wisconsin: 76.9%
Note that it’s gotten FAR easier to vote in the USA over the last decade or so, and especially post-pandemic. All but three states now have some combination of no-excuse absentee voting by mail, and/or in person early voting. Almost no one is subjected involuntarily to the ridiculous traditional system, where you were forced to stand in line for hours on Election Day itself.
Basically we have a deeply unengaged public, in which nearly two out of five adults who are eligible to vote can’t even be bothered to do so (closer to one out of every two in several states, including some big ones), and in which a huge percentage of those who do vote are barely paying attention to what they’re doing, since they know as much about politics as I know about Olivia Rodrigo (Ironically my theory which is mine has led me to learn enough things about Ariana Grande that my relative ignorance regarding her is no longer a fair representative of the yet more impressive ignorance of our crucial swing voters regarding politics, who just made Donald Trump president again).