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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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"The small group" of more than one in three people that didn't vote.
Oh, you were actually aiming at 100% turnout. Well, that's just silly.
90%, 80%, hell, even 70%. The general wisdom (not necessarily as true today) is that the higher the turnout in U.S. elections, the more likely the democrat is to win. That was the driver of the attached:
mandatory voting looks like a small price to pay for a (more) healthy democracy, Australia seems to be doing a lot better than the other British colonies right now
of course with the US, something like that would have to be combined with an extensive overhaul of public education (moving away from the "breed compliant factory workers"-goal), because healthy democracy also requires an educated population capable of knowing when they're being lied too
Argentina has mandatory voting and they have Milei. How healthy is that?
Argentina also votes on Sunday (a change way simpler than reforming education) and last elections they had 77% turnout. A lot of people simply don't participate in the democracy and there's no way around it. No one serious expect 100% people to vote and blames the 30% that doesn't for the outcomes.
No one expects 100%. Australia hovers around 90% turnout.
The rest below is me just working out some numbers, and isn't meant to convince anyone of anything.
There are ~236 million Americans citizens of voting age, of whom 73.6% (174 million) are registered to vote.
Of the 174 million registered voters, 155.2 million voted.
Of the 155.2m, 77.3m voted for Trump, 75.0m voted for Harris, and 2.9m voted for someone else. Not that this is how the system works, but more people voted for "someone other than Trump" than voted for him.
If 90% of the 174m voters had voted, that would have increased turnout by 1.4m voters. Not enough to change the popular vote, even if they were all for Harris (though depending on distribution there is at least some small chance the Electoral College votes would have changed enough).
If 90% (212.4m) of the 236m eligible voters had voted, that's 57.2m more votes to cast.
Pew Research says that polled non-voters went 44% for Trump, 40% for Harris. Applying that to our hypothetical 57.2m voters, it's 22.9m more for Harris and 25.2m more for Trump, bringing our totals to 102.5m Trump, 97.9m Harris, and a new block of 9.2m undecided. Note that two of those figures rounded up, so the apparent total is 212.6m rather than 212.4m.
The difference between Trump-Harris at this point is 4.6m votes. For Harris to tie/win the popular vote on the new undecided block, she would have needed 75% of them (Harris 6.9% vs. Trump 2.3m).
All of that hinges on polls reflecting reality, which lately is much easier to question (not based on misinformation, just with polling managing so often not matching the real vote results).
Thank you for going on this numbers journey with me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-election-trump-harris.html
NYT reported that data suggests that nonvoters would have given Trump a larger win.