How many people voted in 2010 in the US midterms

[Wesley_Clark]

I’ve read 96 million voted in 2006 and about 130 million in 2008. Presidential elections have higher turnout than midterms, but I can’t find info on google about how many voted in 2010 in the midterms. Has that info been collected and released yet?

[XT]

I don’t think the results are out yet, but I read somewhere that over 12 million people alone clicked Facebook’s I Voted link. From what it looked like to me (purely anecdotal), turn out was about average or a bit less, but it’s hard to tell since I think that early voting made a pretty big impact on the lines at my usual voting establishment.

-XT

[Marley23]

According to the New York Post, turnout was around 90 million. MSNBC had a similar estimate ahead of time, and says there were 86 million votes cast in the 2006 elections. You’d expect turnout to go up because the voting age population is going up, and it sounds like a somewhat larger-than-average proportion of eligible voters participated.

McDonald, who bases his projections on early voting data as well as trends in individual states, calculates that turnout will be about 41.3 percent of the eligible voting population.

That’s comparable to the population that turned out in 1994 (41.1 percent of the eligible population) and the highest share since at least 1982.

Those numbers still pale in comparson to turnout in a typical presidential election. Average turnout in presidential years is 55 percent, compared to about 40 percent for off-year contests.

[Kent_Clark]

According to this story, Missouri voter turnout was 46.8% compared to 60.7% in 2008. No figures given for 2006.