News on the 2020 US election is on hype at the moment. And it's not just Americans that are looking forward to the final results. The entire world has its eyes on the outcome. So far, the total number of ballots has exceeded 90 million. This means that the number of votes this year and the total turnout has been massive. Since the United States is a very diverse country, its citizens belong to a variety of backgrounds, having their origins based in different regions across the globe. Voting has not always been the same for everyone though, and this has been proven by records.
If we have a look at the voter turnout during the last twenty years in the United States, we will find that it has not always been constant. The number of voters belonging to different racial and ethnic backgrounds has been fluctuating in almost every year. White Americans themselves have remained active participants of the US election all the way back since 1996 if we take into account the year closest to the last two decades under observation. So the growth in White American voters has not seen that much of a change, moving just 4 per cent higher from 61% to 65%.
Now let's have a look at people belonging to other racial and ethnic backgrounds. It was in the US elections of 2012 that for the very first time, the number of black voters was greater than the number of white voters. And in the 2016 elections, the turnout of black voters has been the highest recorded number so far for Black Americans - at 59 per cent. Adding to these, the turnout of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans was also at an all-time high in the 2016 elections, with each recorded percentage at 49 and 48 respectively.
The outcome has been slow due to voting laws and voter suppression, especially in the case of minorities. This time in the 2020 US elections, it is due to the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic that many ballots at many locations have not been placed there in the first place, if not inaccessible. However, there have been many ballots via mail at the moment, and the counting is still on. It's not an entirely new method and the counting may still take an unprecedented amount of time. The infographic below shows how the voter turnout increased, as per the respective ethnicities and backgrounds of the citizens of the United States.
Infographic by: Statista
