The Waukegan Study of Voter Turnout Prediction

An increasingly close two-party balance in the United States presents the pre-election pollsters with many difficult problems. Not the least of these is the problem of turnout, and simple questions of intent, such as “Will you vote?”, have not proven to be effective predictors of actual turnout on election day. In this article, the author describes the construction and validity of several question batteries designed to predict turnout and discusses several factors which seem to be significantly associated with non-voting. Mungo Miller is Chairman of the Department of Psychology and Director of the Opinion Research Center at Lake Forest College. He is currently in Germany on the State Department Exchange Program as a specialist on interviewing methods.