A Closer Look at Election Turnout
Written by Westinor
In a several-hour-adventure in the wee hours of the morning, I compiled the voter turnout of every election (over a hundred of which have taken place) since June 2018. Unfortunately, my terrible handling of the data and a very confusing crash course in Excel at four in the morning meant that the data is probably a bit scuffed, as a disclaimer – but below, you can see visualized data for every election for both the Senate and Presidency/First Ministership (thanks PhDre!)
A look at combined turnout from both Presidential/First Minister and Senate elections!
Now, if those colors are a bit confusing to you, don’t worry – let’s break it down and take a look into what’s going on.
Presidential Election Turnout
In comparison to their counterparts in the Senate, Presidential elections tend to fluctuate a bit more in turnout. Pre-Autumn 2018 would see incredible highs for voter turnout in both Senate and Presidential elections, with the latter climbing to counts of 80 total votes or higher at times. However, we see a stark dropoff in vote counts from July of 2018 onwards. This may be attributable to several factors – a forum switch occurred in Fall of 2018 that would have had significant infrastructural impacts on the voting process, and a “Summer Slump” is noted in a previous article by Prim which might provide insight into the lower turnout.
This trend is not isolated, though, and instead continues on for a year and a half. One additional factor in hurting long-term turnout may be an Amendment to the Citizenship Act passed in January of 2019, which instituted a requirement for forum-side activity in the thirty days before a citizenship review which may have hurt turnout from primarily-gameside voters. Another may have been the Executive split, which didn’t immediately bump election turnout down drastically, but saw continuously lower turnout post-Spring 2019 until the Drew Boom. After the beginning of 2019, Presidential elections maintained turnouts of sub-50 up until mid-2020.
An obviously stark increase in turnout occurs during the June 2020 elections as a product of the Drew Boom, bringing in a massive influx of new players to active regions at the time – including Europeia. Numbers spike consistently to nearly 60 voters per election and beyond, which has largely been maintained until recent elections. Relatively smaller rises and falls occur, largely linked to bursts of competitive elections towards the ends of 2021 and 2022, as well as strings of uncontested elections or successive presidencies at the hands of Writinglegend and JayDee. The last notable swing occurs in JayDee’s uncontested election in October 2023, which brings turnout the closest it’s been to 50 voters since 2019, before rising back up to the modern record-breaking levels in the most recent election.
Senate Election Turnout
Senate turnout is relatively monotonous to its Executive counterpart, though the more frequent occurrences allow us to better track turnout over time. Senate turnout appears to reflect similar trends in regional voter activity as represented in the Presidential election turnout, with a stark low coming at the end of 2019 before rising back up in the rebounds of the pandemic and Drew Boom in 2020.
Two outliers are apparent: the July 2023 General Election and the resulting Runoff election, as well as a General Election in July 2022. The 2022 election appears to be sparked by a competitive election off the back of vivid discussion of pertinent issues of the time like the Frontier Act proposed by McEntire and Legislative-Executive relations, specifically over Ministerial oversight. The 2023 election was memorable for contentious debate over the use of Senate oversight yet again, off the heels of a year-defining event in the PNG of Madjack and subsequent fallout in the wider Gameplay arena, which carried over into the by-election between McEntire and Ellenburg – the latter of whom had sparked the initial conversation on Senate Oversight after her prominent usage of the such in the aforementioned event. The lesson, if there is one, is that scandals definitely put in the work for driving high Senate election turnout!
General Trends
Aside from general conclusions over time, certain patterns occur and are maintained throughout the years.
Runoffs didn’t tend to actually have consistently higher or lower turnout than regular election cycles, but there are two trends of note. Firstly, Presidential election runoffs tended to show out more voters in higher magnitudes than the otherwise (many) runoffs in the Senate. Secondly, all runoffs that resulted in lower vote counts occurred in Senate election runoffs.
There was also no clear trend between higher candidate numbers and turnout. Two-candidate Presidential elections could be just as robust as neighboring multi-candidate elections, though multi-candidate elections tended to draw in higher turnout more often than two-candidate ones – this may just be an aftereffect of the greater frequency of two-candidate Presidential elections, though. Senate elections with more candidates followed the same pattern, with the highest turnout occurring in particularly contested elections.
In most cases, Presidential runoffs would weed out the accompanying third or fourth tickets that wouldn’t otherwise garner many votes in the first round, perhaps indicating that the retainment of a similar number of candidates and the nature of Presidential runoffs being between the two vote leaders, not the lowest vote-getters, sustained voter interest. Combine that with the high-profile stakes of presidential elections, and it makes sense that Presidential runoffs would tend towards increasing voter turnout, whereas Senate runoffs might lose the interest of those who hadn’t voted for the tied and lowest-prized candidates.
By-elections also didn’t garner considerably higher or lower turnout – in fact, there were a few more instances of generally lower turnout among by-elections than in Generals, likely given that such elections, while providing room for some controversy, wouldn’t focus on wider-scale discussions of policy and events of interest to the same extent as General elections would, providing instead a mid-term calibrating discussion with lower stakes.
Heightened turnout highlights a promising trend for Europeia, and with this term being President JayDee’s final one, there is hope for yet another competitive Presidential election on the horizon that will, with luck, continue the record of high turnout. Political engagement is a key aspect of Europeia, and keeping a close watch on our election turnout is akin to keeping a finger to the pulse of our region.
