We don't yet have final numbers on how many Americans voted this year, but preliminary figures suggest that turnout is probably down from 2008 — down in percentage terms, and possibly down in absolute terms as well. The population is growing, but the number of voters seems to be shrinking.

I don't see low voter turnout as quite the crisis others do. I'm not against high turnout or in favor of low turnout. I'm just unpersuaded that the optimal level is 100 percent.

For example, one common argument is that a higher turnout makes the results of an election more legitimate. By this standard, President Barack Obama's victory in 2008 was less legitimate than Richard Nixon's in 1968. According to the compilation by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 57.5 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots in 2008, whereas four decades earlier, when Nixon was defeating Hubert Humphrey, nearly 61 percent of the voting-age population went to the polls. Following the same logic, Nixon's win was less legitimate than Dwight Eisenhower's in 1952, which saw a turnout of 63.3 percent — the highest in the past 100 years.

Want higher turnout? The highest in U.S. history came in 1876, at 81.8 percent. The truth is, turnout has been falling for decades. That's why it's a mistake to try placing the blame for this year's drop-off on, for example, Hurricane Sandy.



More to the point, the 2008 turnout to elect the nation's first black president was an unlikely spike in a trend running very much the other way. This year's turnout represents not an outlier in need of explanation but a regression to the mean.



The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that we don't vote because the welfare state has made us comfortable. Others blame technology — in particular, the many gadgets that entertain us at home. Political scientists have long believed that unemployment decreases turnout (although some recent research suggests that losing a job within a month of the election makes one more likely to vote). Some researchers even suggest that turnout isn't as bad as we may think, once we exclude from the voting-age population those who are ineligible because they are felons.





I quite understand why each party places such an emphasis on turnout by voters expected to support its candidate. That is a separate matter. Encouraging people to vote because you think it will help your side gain or hold power doesn't strike me as a particularly admirable way to think about civic responsibility.



Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of "The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama," and his most recent novel is "The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln."