Record-High Latino Voter Registration, but Latino Voter Turnout Trends Low

The Pew Hispanic Center has recently released a report detailing the current registration of Latino voters for the upcoming presidential election, revealing an all-time high of nearly 24 million Latino voters registered to vote.  These 23.7 million registered Latino voters are up 22% since 2008; this aligns with the fact that Latino voters now comprise 11% of the nation's available voters, up from 9.5% in 2008.

Despite the high number of Latino registered voters, the registered Latinos are much less likely to show up at the polls than registered whites and blacks.  Half of the Latino voters who were registered in 2008 voted, while 65% and 66% of registered whites and blacks voted, respectively.  Additionally, 55% of Hispanics are ineligible to vote (for example, not U.S. citizens or too young to vote) while only 31% of blacks and 21% of whites are ineligible.

The disparity between eligible Latino voters and continued low turnout has caused quite a stir within the media.  In a piece analyzing this occurrence, Ed Pilkington of The Guardian states that "the statistics spell enormous potential rewards for any politician or political party who manages to release the Latino genie from the bottle."

Census Bureau Releases Data on Voting Trends

Earlier this week the Current Population Survey and the U.S. Census Bureau released revised data on voting trends from 1964 to 2010.  The data examines voting and registration behavior by region, race and ethnicity, gender, age, educational attainment and other demographic features for both congressional and presidential elections.  One graph that was included was “Percent  Voting by Race and Age: Presidential Elections,” which shows the percentage of whites and blacks of voting age and whites and blacks 18-24 years old that voted from 1968 to 2008.  For every presidential election in this time period, a substantially larger percentage of all voters participated than the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds.  In 1968 and 1972, a much larger percentage (roughly 52% for each election) of white 18 to 24-year-olds voted than black 18 to 24-year olds (approximately 38% and 35% respectively).  This racial gap in voting narrowed substantially by 1984, however, when both groups were slightly above 40% with the percentage of white 18 to 24-year olds voting only slightly higher than black 18 to 24-year-olds.  Since 2000, young black people have shown a better voter turn- out than white young people – especially in the 2008 election in which roughly 52% of black young people voted compared to only about 44% of white young people.