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 l