(Forbes) - Historically, the U.S. midterms have always had a weaker voter turnout than the country’s presidential elections. Over the years, only about 40% of eligible voters actually cast their vote in the midterms compared to approximately 50 to 60% in the presidential elections. That could well change this year with a massive volume of early voting pointing towards a record turnout. So far, more than 35 million early votes have already been cast, easily beating 2014′s total of 20 million ahead of election day.
Despite the historic number of early votes this year, it is still far behind the 2016 presidential election when over 46 million were counted on the eve of the contest. It is also likely to be far behind major national elections in other developed countries. Even though U.S. turnout was high among registered voters at 87% during the last presidential election, it trailed other countries by a huge distance when turnout was measured as a percentage of the voting-age population at just 55.7%.
Some countries have a system of compulsory voting which consistently results in high turnout and Belgium is a notable example with 87.2% during its most recent national election in 2014. Many countries without that system are still far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to hitting the polls. For example, 82.6% of voting-age Swedes cast their ballot in 2014 while that figure was just under 78% in South Korea last year, according to the Pew Research Center. Source Page
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