Voters cast their ballots at Metropolitan Library in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2020. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Voters cast their ballots at Metropolitan Library in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2020. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

Americans voted in record numbers in last year's presidential election, casting virtually 158.four meg ballots. That works out to more than half-dozen-in-x people of voting age and nearly two-thirds of estimated eligible voters, according to a preliminary Pew Enquiry Eye assay.

However you measure it, voter turnout jumped in 2020

Nationwide, presidential ballot turnout was about 7 per centum points higher than in 2016, regardless of which of three dissimilar turnout metrics we looked at: the estimated voting-age population as of July ane, that gauge adjusted to Nov. i, and the estimated voting-eligible population, which subtracts noncitizens and ineligible felons and adds overseas eligible citizens. Based on these measures, turnout was the highest since at least 1980, the earliest year in our analysis, and possibly much longer.

The rise in turnout was fueled in function by the bitter fight between incumbent President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden: A preelection survey found a tape share of registered voters (83%) maxim it "really thing[ed]" who won. Just some other big factor was the dramatic steps many states took to aggrandize mail balloting and early voting because of the COVID-xix pandemic.

Turnout rates increased in every state compared with 2016, only of the ten states where it rose the most, seven conducted Nov'due south vote entirely or mostly past mail, our analysis shows. Six of those states had recently adopted all-postal service voting, either permanently (Utah and Hawaii) or for the 2020 elections but (California, New Jersey, Vermont and nearly of Montana).

The past ii months have been among the near turbulent mail-election periods in American history, with unfounded but constantly repeated claims of voting fraud culminating in the January. six attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. Given the continuing divides over the 2020 presidential election, we wanted to put the actual, verified turnout into some broader context. (The Census Bureau typically releases a detailed report on registration and voting later on every national election, but that'south not probable to come up out for several months yet.)

Measuring U.S. voter turnout is one of those things that seems intuitively straightforward simply in practice is anything but. U.S. elections are run non past a single national agency, as in many other advanced democracies, just by individual states and counties within states. There is no key registry of eligible voters, no uniform rules for keeping registrations electric current, and no requirement to report vote totals in a consistent mode.

All of which ways that calculating turnout rates inevitably involves judgment calls – both in choosing which votes to include (the numerator) and the population against which to compare them (the denominator).

For this post, we originally wanted to base our analysis on total ballots counted, a metric that includes all ballots regardless of offices voted for. (It'south typically slightly college than the presidential vote, since there are always some voters who skip that competition but vote in downwards-ballot races.) But not all states take reported total-ballots data, so we turned our attention to the presidential race, which nearly always is the ane that attracts the most votes.

Nosotros compiled the official votes cast and counted for all presidential candidates (including write-in votes, when available) in 2016 and 2020, as certified and reported past each state's chief election function. For the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, for which we just needed aggregate nationwide vote totals, we relied on Dave Leip'southward Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, supplemented when necessary by data from the Clerk of the U.Due south. House of Representatives.

For comparative purposes, we calculated the presidential-vote totals equally percentages of iii separate measures of the potential voter pool: the 18-and-over population as of July 1, every bit estimated past the Demography Bureau; those numbers interpolated to Nov. i by Michael McDonald, a political scientist and turnout expert at the University of Florida; and McDonald's estimate of the voting-eligible population, which subtracts noncitizens and ineligible felons and adds overseas eligible citizens.

Estimated turnout rates for other countries, which we've previously written about, were obtained from the International Institute for Democracy and Balloter Assistance, which works to promote and back up commonwealth around the world.

In Hawaii, turnout rose from 42.3% of the estimated voting-eligible population in 2016 to 57% concluding year, the biggest turnout increment in the land by this measurement. In Utah, turnout increased by virtually 11 percentage points, from 56.8% of estimated eligible voters in 2016 to nearly 68% in 2020.

Voter turnout increased in every U.S. state during the 2020 general election

The smallest turnout increases, every bit shares of estimated eligible voters, were in Northward Dakota (3.iii percent points), Arkansas (3 points) and Oklahoma (2.5 points). Interestingly, the District of Columbia's adoption of all-mail voting for the 2020 ballot didn't seem to affect turnout much: 63.7% of estimated eligible D.C. voters voted for president, 3.3 percentage points to a higher place the 2016 turnout level.

Minnesota had the highest turnout of any state last year, with 79.4% of estimated eligible voters casting ballots for president. Colorado, Maine and Wisconsin all followed close behind, at about 75.5%; Washington land, at 75.2%, rounded out the elevation five. The lowest-turnout states were Tennessee (59.6% of estimated eligible voters), Hawaii and W Virginia (57% each), Arkansas (55.9%) and Oklahoma (54.8%).

The Demography Agency will release its own estimates of turnout after this yr, using a somewhat dissimilar methodology (people who say they voted every bit a share of estimated voting-historic period population). Simply based on the pattern of previous years, it's likely the Census will show the highest turnout since the 1960s.

Despite the big bump in turnout last year, the U.S. notwithstanding lags backside most of its developed-nation peers when information technology comes to electoral participation. Out of 35 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development for which estimates of voting-age population in the most recent national election were available, U.S. turnout ranked an underwhelming 24th.