A voter fills out her ballot at a Salida, Calif., polling place on Election Day 2018. The 52 percent turnout for the midterm elections far exceeded the 33 percent turnout in 2014.
The Election Administration and Voting Survey, published after every federal election since 2004, is the numerical bible of all things electoral.
Clocking in at 251 pages, the newly released report on the 2018 midterm elections doesn't lack for interesting statistical tidbits.
Here then are five of the most interesting nuggets from the report, issued by the Election Assistance Commission.
120 million Americans – 52 percent of voting-age citizens – cast a ballot. That's a huge jump from the 2014 midterms, when turnout was 33 percent.
The states with the highest turnout were Minnesota (64.2 percent) and Colorado (63.8) percent. The lowest turnout was in Arkansas (35.8 percent) and Hawaii (38.9 percent).
Alaska, Kentucky and the District of Columbia all report having more people on their voter rolls than in the Census estimates of their voting age population – an undeniable sign their records are not up to date.
While more than half of Americans who voted did so on Election Day, one-quarter voted by mail and another one-fifth voted in-person at early voting sites.
More than 200,000 polling sites were in use on Election Day, staffed by more than 600,000 poll workers. Still, a survey of election officials included in the report found 70 percent stating that it was "very difficult" or "somewhat difficult" to find enough poll workers.
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RepresentUs
RepresentUs acquired 8,000 signatures on a petition asking Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to keep working on a "revolving door" bill. Paula Barkan, Austin chapter leader of RepresentUs, handed the petition to Brandon Simon, Cruz's Central Texas regional director, on July 31.
Remember that tweet exchange in May between Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the one where they discussed bipartisan legislation to ban former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists?
To recap: Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her support for legislation banning the practice in light of a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen, which found that nearly 60 percent of lawmakers who recently left Congress had found jobs with lobbying firms. Cruz tweeted back, extending an invitation to work on such a bill. Ocasio-Cortez responded, "Let's make a deal."
The news cycle being what it is, it's easy to forget how the media jumped on the idea of the Texas Republican and the New York Democrat finding common ground on a government ethics proposal. Since then, we've collectively moved on — but not everyone forgot.
The government reform group RepresentUs recently drafted a petition asking Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez to follow through on their idea, gathering more than 8,000 signatures.
Sixty percent of young adults in the United States believe other people "can't be trusted," according to a recent Pew Research survey, which found that younger Americans were far more likely than older adults to distrust both institutions and other people. But adults of all ages did agree on one thing: They all lack confidence in elected leaders.
While united in a lack of confidence, the cohorts disagreed on whether that's a major problem. The study found that young adults (ages 18-29) were less likely than older Americans to believe that poor confidence in the federal government, the inability of Democrats and Republicans to work together, and the influence of lobbyists and special interest groups were "very big problems."
