Voter Habits Based On Demographics

8 Pages 1923 Words

obtained from the 2002 congressional elections and previous years. I have chosen to exclude the presidential elections because I feel that they would be too complicated to analyze in a paper of this length. Also I believe the congressional elections provide more consistent and traceable trends in our society.
First I will have to take into account the number of people that are unable to vote. Out of the 210,421,000 people that were over the age of 18 in 2002 only 192,656,000 were citizens who would be qualified to vote. This difference is made up of people who do not have United States citizenship. This is important for the consideration of racial and ethnic differences in voting rates. Immigration has affected the non-citizen population of many groups. Only two percent of Non-Hispanic whites are not citizens and six percent of

Blacks are not citizens. This is in stark contrast to the thirty-eight percent of Hispanics and thirty-eight percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders who do not have citizenship. This can be seen in the nineteen percent of voting age Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders who voted compared to the thirty percent of the voting age citizen population who voted. This is illustrated well in the following graph.

The overall percentage of 18 and over citizens who voted in the 2002 congressional election was at the second lowest with the 1998 election being the lowest. There has been an increase in the overall number of people eligible to vote, but a decrease in the percentage that register ...