Last November, in one of the closest elections ever, nearly half of eligible voters failed to come to the polls. With so much at stake, why was this the case?

Jack Doppelt (IPR-Journalism) and Medill Professor Ellen Shearer, continuing their research on non-voters, found that most non-voters said they didn’t vote because they weren’t registered. If they had voted, however, their choices would not have affected the outcome of the election.

In the weeks following the election, Doppelt, Shearer, and a team of Medill graduate students, along with the Campaign Study Group, interviewed 859 people who said they voted and 1,053 individuals who said they failed to vote. Respondents discussed their reasons for voting or not voting, their political beliefs, their knowledge about issue positions of the candidates, their news consumption habits, and their demographic backgrounds.

Among non-voters, the top reason given for failing to vote is not being registered. Thirteen percent cited their dislike of the candidates, 8% said they were working, 8% cited unplanned travel, and 5% said they had no interest in politics.

When asked whom they would have voted for, 37% of the survey respondents picked Bush, 37% chose Gore, 5% chose Nader, and 2% picked Buchanan.

The survey results were released in a report in early March, and the Medill News Service has put out several print and broadcast stories based on the results that specifically address why youth in particular did not vote. The Pew Charitable Trust funded the research.

Non-voters generally are younger, less-educated, and make less money than voters, the results show. More non-voters (40%) identify themselves as political independents than do voters (27%).

But voters and non-voters share many attitudes about politics and social institutions, and non-voters identified certain strategies to make them more likely to vote in future elections.

Non-voters and voters agree on the country’s most important problems. Four of the five issues defined by voters as “the most important problem facing the country today” also make the top five list of concerns among non-voters—a lack of ethics and values in American society, infighting within the government, concerns about the health of the economy, and crime. Education, which made the top five list of problems named by voters, ranked sixth on the list by non-voters.

Doppelt and Shearer conducted a similar survey of non-voters after the 1996 election, which led to their book, Nonvoters: America’s No Shows. What’s surprising is how similar the data from two such different elections looks.

In 1996, the incumbent, President Bill Clinton, won re-election easily, and that foregone conclusion seemed to justify a low voter turnout. The 2000 election, however, had no incumbent, and the candidates ran a close race that the media covered extensively.

“All of the factors should have given a much higher turnout” in 2000, Doppelt said. This indicates that “the problems (of low turnout) are beyond individual candidates or race.”

Doppelt’s team found encouraging data in that “non-voting is not necessarily a chronic disease,” and past voters can be motivated to return to the polls. Among non-voters in the past election, 34% say they frequently vote and only 25% admit to never voting.

“Before we had made the assumption that if half of America doesn’t vote, we’re talking about the same people each time who aren’t voting. That’s only true for half of non-voters,” Doppelt said. “They’re really a moving target.”

Non-voters suggested allowing same-day voter registration, holding elections over two or three days, expanding the absentee voter system, or voting via the Internet would motivate more of them to vote. Of those options, Doppelt recommended same-day registration as the easiest to accomplish.

However, the report notes that these changes might not result in huge increases in turnout. When asked what they would do to raise turnout if they were in government, only 21% cited procedural changes. Thirty-one percent responded that they did not know and 12% said that nothing could be done.