Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections
Recent decades have seen increasing concern over the fact that youth voting turnout is consistently lower than turnout among older generations. Several programs to increase the rates of voting among young people—such as MTV's "Rock the Vote" (founded in 1990) and the "Vote or Die" initiative (starting in 2012)—may have marginally increased turnouts of those between the ages of 18 and 25 to vote. However, the "Stanford Social Innovation Review" found no evidence of a decline in youth voter turnout. In fact, they argue that "Millennials are turning out at similar rates to the previous two generations when they face their first elections."
Voter turnout
For the denominator, it is often assumed that the number of eligible voters was well defined, but again, this is not the case. In the United States, for example, there is no accurate registry of exactly who is eligible to vote, since only about 70–75% of people choose to register themselves. Thus, turnout has to be calculated based on population estimates. Some political scientists have argued that these measures do not properly account for the large number of illegal aliens, disenfranchised felons and persons who are considered 'mentally incompetent' in the United States, and that American voter turnout is higher than is normally reported. Professor Michael P. McDonald constructed an estimation of the turnout against the 'voting eligible population' (VEP), instead of the 'voting age population' (VAP). For the American presidential elections of 2004, turnout could then be expressed as 60.32% of VEP, rather than 55.27% of VAP.