Received: from sobek.Colorado.EDU (sobek.Colorado.EDU [128.138.151.62]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.7.6/8.7.3/CNS-4.0p) with ESMTP id MAA15528 for ; Tue, 10 Jun 1997 12:09:21 -0600 (MDT) Received: (from bjohnson@localhost) by sobek.Colorado.EDU (8.8.5/8.8.5/Unixops/Hesiod/(SDM)) id MAA16281; Tue, 10 Jun 1997 12:09:18 -0600 (MDT) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 12:09:18 -0600 (MDT) From: Johnson Brett Edward To: socgrads , sociology grad students Subject: 1996 election class activity Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I just did some footwork on the net and found this information and I thought that it might be helpful. At the end of these figures are my ideas for a class activity. These figures are approximations. See the end of the message for details on my calculation process. 1996 elections results: % of registered % of voting Candidate: # of votes: % of voters: voters: age adults: Clinton (D) 45,628,667 50 25 23 Dole (R) 37,869,435 41 20 19 Perot (Ref) 7,874,283 9 4 4 Nader (Green) 577,000 .6 .3 .3 Browne (Lib) 463,000 .5 .2 .2 Phillips (Tax) 178,000 .2 .1 .1 Hagelin (Nat. Law) 109,000 .1 .1 .1 This 49% turnout of registered voters for 1996 was the lowest ever in the United States for a presidential election. 1992 actually reversed a 20 year trend of declining voting percentages by getting 55% of registered voters to the polls. CLASS ACTIVITY: I plan to use this information in a class activity. I will give about half the class cards that say "didn't vote" (I may include different reasons on the cards for why people don't vote, e.g. "I forgot", "I hate both sides", "My vote doesn't make a difference"). I will then distribute a number of cards, in proportion to the % of voting age adults that voted for a candidate, to the students (I may also include some reasons why a person might vote for that particular candidate). I would then have them go around the room and act out the situation of why they voted the way they did, according to their card. This activity would serve as a fun introduction to studying political ideologies in this country. It also shows the "problem of democracy" in this country. I'm also looking for information on the topic of what % of each social class vote in this country. NOTE: THESE FIGURES ARE APPROXIMATIONS Clinton received 50% of the votes so I doubled that number to get the number of voters (91,257,334). Since 49% of registered voters voted in the 1996 presidential election I divided the number of voters by .49 to get the number of registered voters (186,239,457). I then used census data for 1996 to get the number of adults over the age of 18 (197,000,000). brett johnson doctoral student univ. of colorado-boulder bjohnson@sobek.colorado.edu **I would appreciate any feedback about this activity :-)