On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 12:52:28AM -0700, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
> On Nov 6, 2004, at 12:17 AM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>
> >In 1944 vague memories of my long-ago American politics classes
> >suggest that turnout was very high despite being somewhat depressed
> >by the very high number of people in uniform during an age when
> >soldiers were expected to abstain from political activity.
> >Nonetheless, I think a dataset covering the last ~40 years of
> >American Presidential elections is pretty good.
>
> "Vague memories" ... and you dare to ask me for empirical citations?
>
> I find it interesting that when you have an opportunity to show
> yourself as superior by holding solid facts, you don't. I think you're
> an ideologue and you really don't have anything at all to back you up
> apart from your own delusions.
Hmmm. I think Gautam was being a little lazy and relying too much on his
memory. He also has a tendency to assume that his (to the rest of us)
vague citations of his {heros, contacts, etc} opinions' are conclusive
in a debate. Still, in cases of historical facts, his recollections tend
to be correct, and when he isn't in hero-worship mode, his arguments
tend to be rational.
But I think that your comments, Warren, have often been incoherent. When
they have been comprehensible, they have tended to be absurd,
irrational, and contrary to facts. I have found most of your posts to
be nearly worthless. You really need to try MUCH harder if you want to
persuade people of anything, or even if you want to avoid appearing the
fool.
I rarely take the word of anyone without some fact-checking or research
of my own. But if I am short of time and the subject is not of great
importance to me, I will sometimes rely on other people being correct
without checking it out. On points of historical fact, I have sometimes
done this in the past with Gautam's posts.
I would NEVER consider doing this on ANY subject with Warren's posts.
Anyway, enough opinions on credibility of sources. Here's the relevant
data, which only took a few minutes to find:
http://www.fairvote.org/turnout/preturn.htm
-------------
YEAR TURNOUT
=============
1924 48.9%
1928 51.8%
1932 52.6%
1936 56.8%
1940 58.8%
1944 56.1%
1948 51.1%
1952 61.6%
1956 59.4%
1960 62.8%
1964 61.9%
1968 60.9%
1972 55.2% (voting age lowered to 18 in 1971)
1976 53.5%
1980 52.6%
1984 53.1%
1988 50.1%
1992 55.2%
1996 49.0%
2000 51.0%
-------------
2004 60%
I spot-checked a few of the numbers from this table at
http://www.idea.int/vt/region_view.cfm?region=northamerica&CountryCode=US
and they mostly agree, although idea reports somewhat lower rates for
1996 and 2000. To break the tie, I checked at
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763629.html
and the almanacs percentages for 1996 and 2000 agree with those printed
above from fairvote.
As for 2004, the estimates are at about 59-60% (120M voters)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aoLXKdg1jbi0&refer=us
--
Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/
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