In any given election, between 35 and 60 percent of eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. It’s not that hard to understand why. Our system doesn’t make it particularly easy to vote, and the decision to carve out a few hours to cast a ballot requires a sense of motivation that’s hard for some Americans to muster every two or four years — enthusiasm about the candidates, belief in the importance of voting itself, a sense that anything can change as the result of a single vote. “I guess I just don’t think that one person’s vote can swing an election,” said Jon Anderson, who won’t be voting for president this year because of moral objections to both candidates. [....]
Of the 8,000-plus people we polled, we were able to match nearly 6,000 to their voting history. We analyzed the views of the respondents in that slightly smaller group, and found that they fell into three broad groups: 1) people who almost always vote; 2) people who sometimes vote; and 3) people who rarely or never vote. People who sometimes vote were a plurality of the group (44 percent), while 31 percent nearly always cast a ballot and just 25 percent almost never vote. And as the chart below shows, there weren’t huge differences between people who vote almost all the time and those who vote less consistently. Yes, those who voted more regularly were higher income, more educated, more likely to be white and more likely to identify with one of the two political parties, but those who only vote some of the time were also fairly highly educated and white, and not overwhelmingly young. There were much bigger differences between people who sometimes vote and those who almost never vote.
Nonvoters were more likely to have lower incomes; to be young; to have lower levels of education; and to say they don’t belong to either political party, which are all traits that square with what we know about people less likely to engage with the political system. [...]
There are, of course, other systemic reasons why some people might vote more inconsistently. Our survey found, for instance, that occasional voters were slightly more likely than frequent voters to have a long-term disability (8 percent vs. 5 percent), and nonvoters were even more likely to fall into this category (12 percent). Black and Hispanic voters are also more likely to experience hurdles, perhaps in part because there tend to be fewer polling places in their neighborhoods. About 24 percent of Black respondents said that they had to stand in line for more than an hour while voting, and Hispanic respondents were more likely to say they had trouble accessing the polling place or couldn’t get off work in time to vote.
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