Turnout in the 2016 presidential election, initially characterized as low, actually exceeded that of the 2012 race in which President Barack Obama won re-election. The candidates devoted virtually all their time and money to 14 battleground states, regarding the vote in the rest of the country as a foregone conclusion. Elections to the House of Representatives were the least competitive since political junkies began rating them in 1984. And unsurprisingly, states that made it easier to register and vote usually experienced significantly higher turnout than states that did not.
Those findings, and a raft of others, are in the latest edition of “America Goes to the Polls,” a distillation of election statistics compiled every two years by Nonprofit VOTE and the United States Elections Project, an election-information clearinghouse run by Michael P. McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor.
