A significant portion of the American electorate, concentrated in low-income and minority communities, remains alienated from the electoral process. As a result, the proportion of the U.S. population that registers to vote and that does vote is highly skewed towards Whites, the educated and the wealthy.

These disparities in the electorate weaken our democracy and skew the national agenda by excluding from major public policy decisions the voices of the least powerful and most vulnerable citizens.

Project Vote documented these disparities in our 2007 report Representational Bias in the 2006 Electorate, which found that:

• Registration and voting rates among African-Americans and Latinos lagged behind White rates by 10-20 percent;
• Americans making over $100,000 were nearly twice as likely to vote as those making $25,000 or less.

This landmark study was followed by a series of state-specific reports on registration and voting demographics in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennslyvania, and Wisconsin.

These reports find a continuing problem with the U.S. electorate:those who are registered and vote are not representative of the U.S.population eligible to vote. The problem of under-representation is particularly severe among young and minority voters, especially young minority males. besides age and race, income, education and residential mobility are also strongly related to voter registration and turnout.

The wide variety of state policies and election laws – ranging from the closing dates of voter registration, to the voting rights of formerly incarcerated persons, to changing identification requirements – all have an impact on the registration and turnout of various subpopulations.

Despite gains made in the 2008 general election—as documented in Project Vote’s memo The Demographics of Voters in America's 2008 General Election: A Preliminary Assessment,the continued disparities strongly point to the need for civic organizations and government officials (at all levels of government) to continue to reduce barriers to participation and embrace voter registration reform that works to reduce the existing representational bias. For their part, governments should view bias in the electorate as a call to embrace voter registration as an affirmative responsibility through better implementation of laws relating to the registration of young, low-income and minority voters, particularly the Public Agency Registration provisions of the National Voter Registration Act.

Project Vote works to close these gaps by encouraging voter participation among young people, and low-income citizens, minority groups and to eliminate unfair barriers to voter registration and participation.