Harvard panel shares strategies to increase voter turnout
Just 56 percent of eligible American voters in cast ballots for president in the 2016 election, and nearly two-thirds remained on the sidelines in the 2014 midterms. With the November election approaching, a Harvard panel on Friday cited those and other statistics to highlight how low voter turnout remains a stubborn challenge to American democracy, while also suggesting possible solutions. “The vote is the most fundamental act of American democracy and yet very few of us actually turn out to vote,” said Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the panel was part of HUBweek (Oct. 8‒14), the annual ideas festival co-founded by Harvard, The Boston Globe, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fung noted that in recent presidential elections, far fewer Americans voted for the winning candidate than cast...