The Not So Indifferent Voter

__"How the Experts Got Voter Turnout Wrong Last Year" by Peter Bruce, "It’s Bruce Who Got the Turnout Story Wrong" by Curtis Gans, and "Reply to Gans" by Bruce, in The Public Perspective (Oct.–Nov. 1997), Roper Center, P.O. Box 440, Storrs, Conn. 06268–0440.__

News stories shortly after the 1996 elections told a gloomy story. A majority of Americans did not even bother to vote. The

48.8 percent voter turnout was said to be the lowest since 1924, sparking a new round of lamentations about America’s civic decline. Hold everything! says Bruce, a research associate at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, at the University of Connecticut. The real story is not quite that bad.

In the first days after the election, the nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (CSAE), the chief source for most of the postelection news stories, reported that 95.8 million Americans (later upped to 96.3 million) voted for president, out of 196.5 million people of voting age—a turnout rate of 49 percent.

Bruce points out that CSAE uses the Census Bureau’s estimate of the voting-age population to represent the eligible electorate. But that figure includes 14.6 million resident aliens and about 2.75 million felons. Subtracting these ineligible voters from the total produces an electorate of 179 million. But the story does not end there. Bruce agrees with CSAE director Gans that 1.1 million aliens naturalized in

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