Voting Turnout Statistics

As one of my FMP briefs I have chosen to do ISTD's Imbalance brief from this year's award briefs. I have chosen to do this brief as it provides a good opportunity to work with a political theme within my work.

Following this year's General Election I have decided to look at voting turnouts and the idea of 'my vote doesn't count' attitude towards voting. As this is an ISTD brief it asks for a typographical interpretation of fact, so I want to also couple this with statistics to give me the opportunity to incorporate some information/data graphics into the project. I have started looking at turnout results for the UK general election to get me started with some figures to work with.

Here are turnout results for the UK General Election from 1918 to 2001.

(From the House of Commons Library Research Paper 04/61 - 'UK Election Statistics 1918-2004', page 17. Available from http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp2004/rp04-061.pdf)

Below are turnout statistics since 1945, covering up to the 2005 election.

(From International IDEA (The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). Available from: http://www.idea.int/vt/country_view.cfm?CountryCode=GB#parl)

A lot of the official documentation from these sites hasn't been updated to include this year's election but BBC is reporting 65.1% turnout. (Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8672976.stm. I feel this number is safe to trust due to the Electoral Commission suggesting the BBC as a source while they verify results themselves: http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/home)

I now have General Election turnout results from 1918 up until this year's 2010 election. The 1918 election was the first election after the The Representation of the People Act 1918 that widened the right to vote to virtually all men and women over 30 that met certain minimum property qualifications and so is seen as a milestone year from the political process in this country, however I will be concerning myself with the results from 1928 onwards where women's suffrage was brought inline with that of males,  enabling all citizens 21 and over to vote – a truer definition of electoral quality.