Voter Turnout Drop in Smaller US Elections

In the USA, the presidential elections get all the media hype, when the change really happens at the local level. This graph shows the drop in voter turnout from presidential to midterm election.

Comment

Inspiration

I was inspired by learning that a startlingly small percentage of voters vote in smaller local elections that affect their schools, local ordinances, and other things that directly affect their daily lives. Here in the USA, the presidential election gets so much hype and creates so much passion around politics, but the smaller more frequent elections are really where the change happens and the momentum starts.

What it does

For day 1, I simply gathered data from census.org to highlight the difference in voter turnout from the 2018 midterm election to the 2020 presidential election. The midterms are still really high stake and publicized elections, yet there is on average a 13.45% drop in voter turnout. Finding local election data was harder but I assume that the drop is even more significant when it comes to smaller elections.

How we built it

I found the data on census.org. For the presidential election it was split into states, and for the midterm election, the numbers were split into voter districts within the states. To streamline the data, I used excel to calculate the midterm numbers by state by adding up the numbers from each district and taking the percentages from the total. Then I used excel to make a bar graph for each state that shows the difference in percent of votes cast versus number of voter age people in that state. That proved to be a giant unreadable graph, and so I split them into the regions.

Challenges we ran into

Using Excel proved to be pretty time consuming and it was frustrating to find that the graph with all the states was too large and unreadable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The spreadsheet looks really pretty and the bar graph portrays what I wanted to show.

What we learned

Census.org has a lot of really cool data available in multiple formats!

What's next for Voter Turnout Drop in Smaller US Elections

My goal is to make a simple website where a user can type in their zip code and see all upcoming local elections, what's on the ballot, how to register, etc. Similar to vote.org but simpler to use.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates