The Independent View: Voter Turnout at 20-Year Low in 2016

Voter turnout this year dipped to nearly its lowest point in two decades.

While election officials are still tabulating ballots, the 126 million votes already counted means about 57.6% of voting age citizens cast ballots this year.

Clinton - 60,839,922
Trump - 60,265,858
Other - 4,894,220

That measure of turnout is the lowest in a Presidential Election since 1996, when 53.5% of voting-age citizens turned out.

As Election officials go through outstanding ballots, such as Provisional ballots and those with Write-Ins, the turnout figures will change.

But it would take another 18.7 million votes to reach the high point for turnout of 2008, when nearly 64% of voting age citizens cast a ballot.

Early results in some of the key states that propelled President-Elect Donald Trump to his win reveal that more voters cast ballots this year than in 2012, even though overall turnout was down.

In Florida, nearly 9.4 million ballots were cast, compared to 8.5 million in 2012.

Michigan saw 4.8 million compared to 4.7 million four years ago.

And in North Carolina, the 4.7 million ballots this year was about 138,000 more than last cycle.

Full measures of turnout won't be clear for as long as several more weeks, when Election officials in the various states finish tabulating and certify the results.

The figures also do not include people of age who are ineligible to vote or have not registered.

Projections from the United States Elections Project show that there were 231,556,622 Americans eligible to vote, but 133,331,500 voted.

That means that 42.4% didn’t vote, while 57.6% did.

This number is not the same number as registered voters. Politico reported in October 2016 that the data firm TargetSmart calculated that there were 200 million people registered to vote, an increase from 146.3 million registered to vote in 2008. Eleven states also allowed same-day voter registration.

The Elections Project notes that there were 251,107,404 people who classify as members of the voting-age population, therefore 117,775,904 of the voting-age population (or 46.9 percent) did not vote.

The U.S. Census bureau estimates that there are 326.9 million people living in the U.S. This is different from the voting-eligible population because there are over 3.2 million people ineligible to vote as felons. The Sentencing Project estimates that 2.5% of the U.S. voting-age population cannot vote because of a felony record.

The number of eligible voters who turned out in 2016 was a slight increase in eligible voter turnout from 2012. FEC data from that election shows that 54.87% of the voting-age population cast a vote for President, or 129,085,410 of the 235,248,000 voting age population cast a vote. However, 2016 was still far from the high reached in 2008, when 58.23% of the voting-age population participated. In 2008, 131,313,820 total votes were cast.

The number of voters might have been up nationally, but if everyone registered to vote really did cast a vote, the results would might have been different.