Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Should we trust the voter rolls? Hell no, eight states have more registered voters than people eligible to vote

In the previous post, I presented evidence that more people voted in 2020 than the total number of registered voters. One criticism is that we should not rely on surveys but government data to estimate the total number of registered voters. 

Using this data on state counts of registered voters and this website that calculates the total number of people in a state who are eligible to register, I constructed the table shown below that displays the number of registered voters as a percent of those eligible to vote. 

You can see that eight states have more registered voters than people eligible to vote, clear evidence that the voter rolls are wildly inaccurate. Another ten states have 95-99% of all eligible people registered which seems highly implausible. Does it make sense that 19 out of 20 eligible people are currently registered? Many states have a serious problem.

As we move down the table, the numbers get more and more plausible. Eight out of ten of all eligible people currently registered? Okay, maybe, but only four states are below that cutoff. 

It seems clear that the rolls in many of these states are larded up with outdated registrations, and the Current Population Survey (CPS) is a more trustworthy way to get an estimate of current registrations. And according to my analysis with CPS data, more people voted in 2020 than the total number of registered voters. 





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