Politics & Government

MAP: Apple Valley, Rosemount Help Minnesota to 3rd Place Voter Turnout Rates

Both Apple Valley and Rosemount had 84 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the 2012 election.

Apple Valley and Rosemount had a high voter turnout in the 2012 election for a state that is itself already well above the national average.

Minnesota fell to third in the country—behind only Mississippi and Wisconsin, according to data the U.S. Census Bureau made public Wednesday evening. Although it had the highest levels in the country of voter turnout in the 2008 election, the 73.2 percent of citizens who voted here in 2012 is still comfortably above the national average of 61.8.

(The Census Bureau’s rates are different from those from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office, which lists a 76.11 percent voter turnout rate. The Census Bureau’s rate for Minnesota is listed as having a margin of error of ± 2.1 percent.)

Find out what's happening in Apple Valley-Rosemountwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The Census Bureau didn’t provide data down to the city level. But figures from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office show that Apple Valley and Rosemount both saw 84 percent of registered voters cast a ballot.

Dakota County had a 76 percent voter turnout rate.

Find out what's happening in Apple Valley-Rosemountwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Nationwide the news was gloomier. The percentage of eligible citizens who voted dipped from 63.6 percent in 2008 to 61.8 percent in 2012. Only one group—blacks—showed a significant increase in voting between the 2008 and 2012 elections.

"Blacks have been voting at higher rates, and the Hispanic and Asian populations are growing rapidly, yielding a more diverse electorate," a news release quoted Thom File, a sociologist in the Census Bureau's Education and Social Stratification Branch and the report's author. "Over the last five presidential elections, the share of voters who were racial or ethnic minorities rose from just over one in six in 1996 to more than one in four in 2012."

The map above shows the percentage of eligible U.S. citizens who voted in the November 2012 election in each state. Darker green states had a higher percentage of turnout. If you click on an individual state, you will see percentages of eligible U.S. citizens who voted in that state broken down by gender, race and ethnic group. This information was released from the US Census Bureau on Wednesday. Some demographic populations of eligible U.S citizen voters were less than 75,000 and too small to make a measure. We labeled them as "Too small to determine a measure."


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