New Report Identifies Gaps in the American Electorate

By Michael Slater January 29, 2015
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Representational Bias in the 2012 Electorate Report

Today, Project Vote is pleased to release Representational Bias in the 2012 Electorate, a major new report that presents a comprehensive picture of continuing disparities in the changing American electorate.

In Representational Bias in the 2012 Electorate, Project Vote’s Senior Public Policy Analyst, Dr. Vanessa Perez, analyzes registration and voting rates for every presidential election in the 21st century. The report examines participation for different demographic groups—according to race and ethnicity, age, gender, income, education, disability, and other factors—to determine the ways in which the American electorate is becoming more or less representative of the citizen population.

A few of the report’s key findings include:

  • Black Americans voted in 2012 at higher rates than White Americans for the first time in modern history.
  • However, America’s growing population of Latino citizens remains underrepresented at the polls.
  • Americans under 30 are also severely underrepresented: they made up 21 percent of the adult citizen population in 2012, but only 15.5 percent of the voting population.
  • While turnout for young voters was low in 2012, young Black voters broke this pattern, voting at much higher rates than young voters from all other ethnic groups.
  • If disparities in voting rates were erased, tens of millions more Americans would have cast ballots in 2012.

Project Vote is committed to building an electorate that accurately represents the diversity of America’s citizenry. Representational Bias provides a detailed analysis of the progress that has been made towards this goal in the 21st century, and also identifies where there is still a great deal of work to be done.

Click here to download the full Representational Bias in the 2012 Electorate, or go to our website to find the report, a summary of key findings, and individually downloadable tables and charts. A press release on this report can be found here.