Final Project - 2020 Voting Analysis

Almost 80 million Americans did not vote in the most recent election, despite record turnouts. I was curious how much of the United States didn’t vote and if their lack of voting may have affected which political party won each state. For this project, I decided to compare the number of people that didn’t vote to the political party that won that state. I hypothesize that the Republican Party won states will have a higher number of voters that don’t vote.

Two Map Color Comparison

For my first comparison, I decided to create two geospatial maps of the total registered voters by state and the total ballots from each state. When comparing I found that in every state, the eligible voting population is greater than the total ballots.

Multilayer Map

I then decided to create a multi-layer map to enhance my data visualization. In this geospatial map, I add in the total state population, the percentage of eligible voters who are registered, the total ballot count, the total registered voters, and the eligible voter population. This visualization confirmed the trend I found in my first comparison, the eligible voting population consistently outweighs the number of ballots. However, there were a few outliers in this data set. The number of registered voters in Alaska, Michigan, Kentucky, and Rhode Island were all greater than the voting-eligible population. However, this likely did not affect the voting process since all states’ ballot counts were lower than the number of registered voters.

Winning Party and Voter Data

Lastly, I overlaid the political party that won each state over the voting data. This allowed me to compare each state’s political party to the number of voters that did not vote. To determine the number of eligible voters that did not vote, I took the number of eligible voters and subtracted the number of estimated ballot votes. The democratic state with the highest number of eligible voters that didn’t vote was California, with 9,162,648 people that did not vote. This was also the state with the highest overall number of eligible voters that did not vote. The republican state with the highest number of eligible voters that didn’t vote was Texas, with 7,484,280 people that did not vote. Both parties had states with very high and low numbers of voters that did not vote. From this visualization, I determined that there was no clear correlation between the political party that won and the number of people that didn’t vote and that my hypothesis was wrong. Overall, a large group of Americans chose not to vote in every state, regardless of the political party that won that state.