Trump won this election with turnout at a 20-year low
It wasn't just the result of the presidential election that was unexpected -- a surprisingly large number of people didn't even show up or cast ballots.
Voter turnout in 2016 looks likely to be around 55 percent, based on election numbers that are still being counted, CNN reports. That's the lowest since 1996, when just 49 percent of eligible voters showed up for the presidential race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.
The United States Elections Project calculates there were more than 231.5 million eligible voters this year. Of those people, preliminary tabulations show about 127 million voted in 2016, meaning that well over 100 million people sat this one out.
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Overall turnout may have dipped, but there was an uptick in voting in many swing states, such as Michigan, Florida, Nevada and New Hampshire, according to data compiled by the Cook Political Report and others.
Florida had a huge bump from 2012, when Barack Obama went up against Mitt Romney; 10 percent more voters in that state came out to vote in 2016. Overall, 14 "battleground" states saw an average 2 percent increase in votes cast (although some, like Ohio and Wisconsin, saw a slight drop).
A clearer picture on turnout is expected about two weeks after Election Day.
Topics Elections
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
