New Report Details Turnout, Voter Trends in 2024
Voter turnout ticked downward in 2024 compared to four years earlier, while in-person voting continued to make a comeback in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Election Assistance Commission.
The Election Administration and Voting Survey – which the EAC is required to submit to Congress after each general election – offers a detailed look at Americans’ voting habits and the challenges faced by election administrators, poll workers and state and local officials in the 2024 general election.
Here are some key takeaways from the roughly 300-page report:
Turnout Dropped From 2020 Levels But Remained Elevated
The number of registered voters reached an all-time high in 2024 at more than 211 million Americans. And turnout was still high. More than 158 million ballots were counted in the November general election, according to the EAC’s report. More than 85 percent of voting-age Americans were registered as active voters.
That’s nothing to scoff at. With 64.7 percent turnout nationwide, the 2024 election notched the second-highest turnout in the last five presidential contests and fell just 3 percentage points behind the 2020 election’s turnout.
Only five states – North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin – and the District of Columbia saw voter turnout increase last year from 2020 levels – and only marginally, at that.
And while most states saw their turnout decrease, the largest drop-offs were in Utah, Hawaii, California, Washington, New Jersey, Oregon and Idaho, all of which saw their turnout fall by 5 percentage points or more in 2024.
Poll Workers Are Getting Older, But Easier to Recruit
The EAC’s report also found that poll workers – the people who staff polling locations, set up voting equipment and provide ballots to voters – skewed significantly older in 2024 than four years earlier.
Most poll workers in 2024 were 61 or older. In 2020, by comparison, the largest age group to serve as poll workers was made up of individuals between the ages of 41 and 60. At the same time, nearly twice as many people between the ages of 26 and 40 served as poll workers in 2020 than in 2024.
At the same time, jurisdictions say that it’s becoming easier to recruit a sufficient number of poll workers to staff their voting sites, continuing a trend over the past three elections.
More than 18 percent of jurisdictions said that they had a “somewhat easy” experience finding the poll workers they needed in 2024. That’s a nearly 4-point increase from both 2020 and 2022, when roughly 14.5 percent of jurisdictions reported a similarly easy experience.
Still, the report found, there are still major hurdles to recruiting and retaining poll workers. Roughly 48 percent of jurisdictions reported facing significant challenges in obtaining the necessary poll workers needed in 2024, and the EAC recommended that Congress allocate dedicated funding to bolster poll worker recruitment, training and retention.
Voting Methods Are Changing
One notable change documented in the EAC’s report is how people voted. More than two-thirds of voters cast their ballots in person in the 2024 election, while about three in 10 Americans voted by mail. That’s a decrease from about 43 percent in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic caused mail-in voting to surge.
Since then, many voters have returned to in-person voting, but many are casting their ballots early. About 35 percent of voters in 2024 voted early in person, nearly matching the roughly 37 percent who voted in person on Election Day.
In 2020, by comparison, just 30.5 percent of voters cast their ballots in person on Election Day. The same percentage voted early in person, according to the EAC’s report.
While mail voting has seen a decline since 2020, it’s still more common than it was before the pandemic. In both 2016 and 2018, for example, only about one quarter of voters cast their ballots by mail, the report found.
