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."
Voting age population
Voting age population (VAP) refers to the set of individuals that have reached the minimum voting age for a particular geographical or political unit. The presumption is that they are therefore generally eligible to vote, although other additional factors may cause them to be ineligible, such as lack of citizenship or a prior felony conviction. In estimating voter turnout the voting age population for a political unit is often used as the denominator for the number of individuals eligible to vote in a given election; this method has been shown to lose in accuracy when a larger percentage of the VAP is ineligible to vote. In the United States individuals become eligible to vote in political elections at age 18.