Nathan Newman wrote:
>Doug-- You are being inaccurate or at least confusing turnout based on
>"voting age population" versus "voting eligible population."
-I quite deliberately chose VAP rather than VEP as the denominator. As -the Census guy told me when I was doing my Atlas back in 1994, they -use VAP as the denominator because immigrants etc. have to obey laws -and pay taxes, so total pop over 18 is the relevant number.
Since we are discussing the success in mobilizing voters, VAP is a useless number. Why not use the whole US population, including children, since they have to obey laws and pay taxes on any income they make and the 16 and 17-year olds face a possible draft in the next few years?
I am most interested in the success in mobilizing voters to support candidates-- the failure to mobilize non-citizens to cast votes that they can't cast doesn't seem like a particularly interesting number to measure.
Nathan Newman