Voters who don't for president

[jackdavinci]

Is there data on how many people nationally and per state show up to the polls but decline to vote for any of the presidential candidates? Also looking for the same data for today’s election.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

This has become an increasing concern since the 2000 election. Only a relatively small number of voters choose to vote but deliberately leave the presidential election blank. (My mother did it once, so I know the number isn’t zero.) High rates of presidential undervoting are an almost fail-safe indicator of problems with the voting apparatus.

This article has some useful information:

At the time of the 2000 presidential election, 38 states reported the number of ballots cast in each county. Of the 80.6 million ballots, 1.6 million didn’t register a vote for president . . . While the wire service estimates that Florida had an undervote of 2.9 percent of all ballots cast in 2000, seven states reported a higher ballot drop-off than that: Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wyoming . . . More than 500 counties nationwide had alarmingly high presidential undervotes–such as Bacon County, Georgia’s 11 percent in 2000. After the county traded in its mechanical lever machines for an electronic voting system, the undervote dropped to just 2 percent in the 2002 U.S. Senate race.

I can’t find any numbers for 2004. For 2008, you’ll have to wait until the Secretaries of State publish results in a month or so, and then start canvassing web sites.