Data journalist Mona Chalabi helps visualize voter turnout gaps among national and local elections and why voter participation at all election levels — including local school boards — is one way to strengthen U.S. democracy
Eligible Americans who exercise their right to vote are vital to a strong, representative, and enduring democracy. One way to strengthen democracy is to increase voter turnout at all levels. For several decades, Carnegie Corporation of New York has supported grantees that have developed and advocated for policies to increase voting and voter participation of all citizens, especially among those least likely to vote.
All elections matter. To illustrate this point, we commissioned data journalist Mona Chalabi to help visualize the gaps in voter turnout among national and local elections: 66.8 percent in the 2020 presidential election, 50.3 percent in the 2018 midterm elections, less than 15 percent for municipal elections, and 5–10 percent for local school board elections.
We know very little as a country about who votes in local elections and how key demographics like race, age, income, and education are related to voting patterns and behavior. Important decisions are made at the local level — core services like police and fire departments, transportation, housing, libraries, drinking water, public schools, and elections. A project of Portland State University funded by the Knight Foundation in 2015 that looked at municipal elections found that in 20 of America's 30 largest cities voter turnout for electing community leaders, like mayors and city councilors, was less than 15 percent.
Locally elected school board members compose the largest group of elected officials in the country and yet the National School Boards Association (NSBA) estimates that voter turnout is often just 5 or 10 percent for these elections.
According to a 2022 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, nearly 90,000 school board members oversee the education of more than 50 million public school students with broad responsibilities for district governance that include the allocation of $600 billion in expenditures. School board members typically receive little to no monetary compensation despite their influential role in the education process. Moreover, little to no data exists that tracks school board policy decisions.
In the last year, local school board decisions have made national headlines as school board meetings and decisions have taken on the tenor of culture wars — among them how history is taught, the banning of books, how to keep our schools safe, and mental health support for all students. In their efforts to keep politics out of the classroom, the Campaign for Our Shared Future, a Carnegie Corporation of New York grantee, offers a voter guide for local school board elections as well as guidance on how to effectively participate in decision-making at local schools.
Locally elected school board members compose the largest group of elected officials in the country and yet the National School Board Association (NSBA) estimates that voter turnout is often just 5 or 10 percent for these elections.
While more than 90 percent of school board members are elected by their local communities, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, some cities, like Boston, Chicago (which will hold its first school board election in November 2024), and New York City, among others, are appointed by mayors or in some cases by governors. According to an NSBA survey, school board elections are not always held the same day as national or state elections. These “off-cycle” school board elections see particularly low turnout, according to the Brookings Institution.
Check out your state or local election office website for more information about elections that affect you, your family, your community, your state, and your country. And find out who and what is on your ballot. All elections matter — vote!
A Note on the Data: The United States does not have a federal clearinghouse or aggregate source for voter turnout data for various elections. For its article “Turnout Soared in 2020 as Nearly Two-Thirds of Eligible U.S. Voters Cast Ballots for President,” Pew Research succinctly explained the challenges of reporting voter turnout data in the U.S.
Measuring U.S. voter turnout is one of those things that seems intuitively straightforward but is anything but. U.S. elections are run not by a single national agency, as in many other advanced democracies, but by individual states and counties within states. There is not a central registry of eligible voters, no uniform rules for keeping registrations current, and no requirement to report vote totals in a consistent way.
All of which means that calculating turnout rates inevitably involves judgment calls — both in choosing which votes to include (the numerator) and the population against which to compare them (the denominator).
With guidance from Ben Deufel, vice president of Innovation, Learning and Impact, at the Voter Participation Center, the presidential and midterm election data that we cite is sourced from Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who is a leading expert on voting and the founder and director of the U.S. Elections Project.
For the numerator, McDonald uses total ballots counted. For the denominator, he uses voting-eligible population, which he constructs by taking the voting-age population and subtracting noncitizens, those who cannot vote due to a past felony conviction, and mentally incapacitated persons. McDonald explained via email that two research assistants are currently collecting municipal and school board election data. “The municipal elections are not always conducted by election officials, rather, they are administered by the local government itself,” according to McDonald. “Part of the project is to document local practices on who runs local elections and what data are available.”
Mona Chalabi is a data journalist and 2023 New America Fellow whose work has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, where she serves as data editor.
Kelly Devine is director of content and publications at Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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