Photo: "Thank you!" by Zanthia
As the world continues to revel in the most hopeful and historic election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, other positive developments are shining through. One I'd like to note, as a follow-up to my Do you know how to vote? post, is this: in this 2008 election, the U.S. has had its highest voter turnout ever in the last 48 years.
More than 148 million voters cast their ballots, which equals to 64.1% of the voting-age electorate.
Take a look at this chart, National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections, which features statistics from 1960. (For presidential election years, the stats are in boldface. Mid-term elections, nationally held to elect Congress members and for state/local governments, are in plain type.) So inspiring! Our voting electorate has been completely re-energized across age, race, and economic groups; almost 26 million more voters turned out in 2008 than they did in 2004.
After finding and being moved by these significant voting stats, I stumbled across the above photo on Flickr and had to feature it. Before I began writing this post, I read an article in The Washington Post titled "U.S. Hailed Again as Country of Dreams", and this photo expresses much of the gratitude many worldwide are feeling based on Obama's win.
So, I must say this again: thank you for voting! It has made all the difference in the world.
Isn't it amazing what can happen with an energized electorate? And as you hinted, and John Stewart said election night, we are a nation that can finally say we live up to our creed. Thanks to all of the voters. Well done, Americans!
Posted by: Word Porn | November 07, 2008 at 09:13 AM
WordPorn — Absolutely! Our founding fathers would be so proud.
Posted by: KG | November 07, 2008 at 09:50 AM
I was shocked to read in my local paper that the voter turn-out in my community was way down this year. Their guess as to why this happened was that the media scared people away by reports of long lines at the poles. Go figure.
jj
Posted by: Javajune | December 04, 2008 at 05:37 PM
Javajune — Thanks for your comment. I hadn't heard of this situation — do you have a link to the newspaper article?
Posted by: KG | December 05, 2008 at 12:52 AM