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<\/a><\/p>\nThe overall pattern shows a huge increase in voter turnout from the early days to the Federal era. That is not the subject of discussion here. Subsequently we experience a high rate during presidential election and a lower but still high rate during midterm years. The midterm years during this period are higher than some presidential years now, and represent an 85% or so fraction of the presidential years. Then we see a drop, from around 1890 to the 1930s, followed by a new pattern with two features. First, the overall participation is way down, with midterm elections being well below 50%, and second, the drop during midterms is greater, with midterms being about 66% of presidential years.<\/p>\n
I think both of these patterns can be explained, at least in part, by the normalization of elections to be on a 4-year\/2-year cycle synced nationally.<\/p>\n
There, I connect details of timing of election with a major overarching pattern, using a beautiful hypothesis. What remains is testing the hypothesis in several cases where we can see the details, to see if it works out as expected. I have one case for you. The following graph shows Minnesota primary turnout over time for presidential and midterm years.<\/p>\n
This is the observation I stumbled on last night that prompted me to write this post. Here we see the large binary oscillation between POTUS and midterm years, as expected, from the early 1960s to the present. We aslso see that over this time there is a steady decrease in participation. The break point, 1960, when the pattern changes, is the year Minnesota went form a two year to a four year governor term. Boom.<\/p>\n We also see a diminishing in the up and down cycle since 1994, and some interesting anomalies. That is for discussion another time. At this point, we can say that with respect to this hypothesis — syncing elections ruined turnout — that the center holds.<\/p>\n One solution to this problem would be to unsync the elections. I can think of several ways to do this.<\/p>\n 1) Keep the two year term for the US House, but give half of them one three year term once, so about half the house races are happening every year.<\/p>\n 2) Move around the Senators so there are senatorial races every year.<\/p>\n 3) Move all gubernatorial races to one of the other odd year that is not a POTUS or Midterm year.<\/p>\n I predict that if we did all of that, participation in our elections would spring to 80%. Well, not spring. Move. It would take a decade, but it would get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a topic I’ve been hoping to someday write extensively on, and the truth is I’m not quite ready to do so. But I have an observation that is so startling and so much in line with my thinking on this issue that I thought I’d share it as a way of introducing the … Continue reading How America Ruined Its Own Election System, and How to Fix It<\/span> <\/a><\/p>\n