Voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections appears to have surpassed previous midterms significantly, but it will be a while before we know the full numbers.
Early numbers suggest voter turnout soared in the 2018 midterms
We won’t know the exact figures for a while.
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
Tuesday was a big night in United States politics. It didn’t deliver a tsunami-like blue wave, but it wasn’t bad for Democrats, who took control of the House of Representatives. Republicans, however, maintained control of the Senate.
Interest in this election was abnormally high for a non-presidential year, which many attributed to energy among Democrats and fired-up bases on the left and right in reaction to President Donald Trump. And that appears to have translated to voter turnout: The New York Times is currently estimating that some 114 million ballots were cast this year, well above the 83 million votes cast in 2014 and 91 million ballots cast in 2010. That doesn’t quite rival a presidential year — in 2016, for example, about 138 million people voted — but it’s a pretty big deal.
Ahead of Election Day, there were signs that a high number of Americans were likely to head to the polls. Many voters reported feeling extra enthusiastic to vote this year, and early voting surged, with an estimated 36 million people voting early this year. Young voters appear to have taken advantage of early voting in outsize numbers this year, as did women. Exit polling has also provided some information about who voted this year, though the Census Bureau’s report released next year will provide a more thorough picture.
Voter turnout in midterm elections is generally lower than in presidential years, though the 2018 election is on track to surpass turnout in both 2010 and 2014. According to the United States Elections Project, voter turnout in the 2010 midterms was 41.8 percent. In 2014, it was 36.7 percent — the lowest in 72 years.
By comparison, turnout in presidential years 2008 was 62.2 percent, 2012 was 58.6 percent, and 2016 was 60.1 percent. We still don’t have the final verdict on 2018.
We probably won’t know the final voter turnout numbers for a while
The thing about making projections on voter turnout this soon after the election is that we don’t have the full picture. Counting ballots takes time — potentially days, weeks, or even months.
There are a few reasons for this.
As Annalisa Merelli at Quartz laid out after the 2016 election, counting absentee ballots takes time. Many states require absentee ballots to be received on Election Day, but some states just require them to be postmarked that day and accept them as they trickle in. There are also mail-in ballots that some states, such as California, accept after the election within a certain number of days. (In California, it’s three.) All of those need to be verified and counted as they arrive.
There are also provisional ballots cast by voters when there are questions about eligibility — say, their registration can’t be found or their ID isn’t accepted. Provisional ballots are generally kept separate from other ballots until after the election and a determination is made as to whether a voter as eligible. That can take days to complete, and then those ballots have to be counted.
In California, the country’s most populous state, ballot counting can take weeks. In recent elections, more than half of Californians have voted by mail, according to the Sacramento Bee, and in the primaries over the summer, thousands of voters cast provisional ballots after a printing error left more than 118,000 names off of lists in Los Angeles County alone.
In November 2016, about 4.3 million late-arriving and provisional ballots were still to be counted days after the election. Voter turnout was initially believed to be 51 percent; it eventually wound up at more than 75 percent. That’s a major part of why Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump continued to grow well after the election.
There can also be recounts in too-close-to-call races, or when candidates challenge the results. Essentially, there are just a number of factors — including the US’s decentralized voting system overall — that make tallying up final vote counts a time-consuming process.
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