I’ve been in Larkspur for the last two months, not far from where I lived prior to running off to pursue a really great gal. I voted today at the same polling place that I had voted at in 2004.
The one thing that has kept coming up over and over again in this election season was that everyone has been very interested in getting as many people to the polls as possible.
An article about how people used to vote, by the New Yorker, really struck a cord with me and made me think about how many people voted. I was curious about just what kind of percentage of the population that has voted over time. So I did a little number crunching.
Percentage of Population Voting in Presidential Election
To come from a small percentage of the population who voted for president in 1792, about 0.3%, to nearly 42% in 2004, is a huge improvement. The culture of the United States has come a long way in the last 200+ years, as has the accessibility of voting. This year the need of participation in the democratic process is at all time high. With the strong efforts by all those campaigning to ‘get out the vote’, I hope we can top 50% of the population.
This unfortunately is an optimistic hope, since the greatest percentage of increase in the nations history was in 1952 for the Eisenhower vs Stevenson election. Since the percentage of voters in the last election increased by roughly 4%, I doubt that we’ll see an increase of more than 5-6% this year, which would still be a few points short of 50%.
Percentage Change Between Election Voting Percentages
It may be a while before we get the final results, but if we see more than 154 million votes cast, we’ll have made history in more ways than one. 
On Marianna’s 
blog, she notes that nearly 153 million Americans are registered to vote, and that it is approximately 75% of the population which is of voting age.
As I have spent the time researching and calculating these numbers, I have watched another historic moment in our nations history. Congratulations Mr. President-Elect Barack Obama!
Population and Voter data gathered from Wikipedia.org.
