Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 10:00:30 EST From: A Rose is A FLOWER! Subject: [WRITERS] FILLER: 1996 Presidential Election Vote During the recent discussions, Words from the Monastery wrote: :) Actually, around 25% of the registered voters elected him. Most of us :) didn't vote... It's also the second highest number voting since 1960 (1992 had a slight lead), but for some reason, people like to focus on that percentage... for those who may wonder about that percentage...enough numbers to make everyone fall asleep! according to http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/summ.htm Percent of voting age population casting a vote for President: 49.00% Total vote: 96,277,634 of Voting Age Population (Census Bureau Population Survey for November 1996): 196,498,000 and Bill Clinton (Democrat) received: 47,402,357 votes (49.24% of those voting). roughly 24.13% of the population, if I haven't slipped a digit or two somewhere. (either way--49*49.24 or 47,402,357/196,498,000--a bit of fuzz in the little digits, but 24.13 agreed all the way) According to http://www.fec.gov/pages/htmlto5.htm, this was the lowest percentage turnout during a presidential election year since 1960 (although significantly outrunning the off-year percentages). The 1992 election had reversed the trend, with slightly over 55% turning out, while 1988 was a low year, with just over 50% turnout. (incidentally, it's one of the highest NUMERICAL turnouts--more people voted than ever before, but the number of registered voters is also rising...146,211,960 out of 196,511,000 according to this second table. Note that if you only count registered voters, not total voting age population, the percentage of the vote goes up...whether you are looking at the total number voting or the number voting for Clinton.) Let me see if I can do this in a table (hope I got the divisors and the dividends right...) Voting for Clinton 47,402,357 votes 49.24% of those casting a vote (96,277,634) 32.42% of registered voters (146,211,960) 24.13% of the Voting Age population (196,498,000) I refuse to try to explain how popular votes turn into electoral votes... tink (was that fun? can we do calculus next?) [OWC: perhaps the most difficult task is to explain this kind of statistics to someone so that they understand the meaning of the numbers and don't get lost in the raw figures...contemplate how you might explain these--out of a deck of cards, two suits didn't even vote. One suit went directly for Clinton. Oh, and the deck actually has about 200 million cards in it...?--that's one explanation, what's yours?]