One word.
turnout.

Public question mentioning turnout ↗

By Ahmed · Source did not supply a content licence; original title and text withheld. Link only. · Original post and revision history. HTML converted to plain text; no images or linked-page content copied.

What was the lowest known voter participation rate? ↗

So, comments in this question mentioning extremes such as "nobody voted in election at all", led me to wonder: What was the election where the LEAST percentage of eligible voters participated? The choices are limited to: "populace-wide" elections. E.g. at least 50% of population of a locale are eligible to vote. Elections within last 300 years. Mostly, I'm interested in national level elections in countries that can at least on some level be considered established "democracies" - e.g. those that have a history of, at least 20 years of popular elections prior. Excluded are cases where there are legitimate reasons for low turnout (e.g., the people are avoiding voting because there's a war/insurrection/government thugs scaring them off - such as post-US-invasion Iraq or Mugabe's Zimbabwe). Similarly excluded are special situations, e.g when people are prevented from voting by natural disasters etc... In other words, I'm interested in the elections where the main/only reason one can assume for the low turnout is voter apathy/bad set of choices to vote for/general-low-election-participation culture.

By user4012 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original post and revision history. HTML converted to plain text; no images or linked-page content copied.

How is the number of seats of each land (state) in Bundestag determined? ↗

According to the American-German Institute (figure below), My understanding is that Germany's Bundestag's number of seats is fixed at 630, which is first allocated to each party proportionally according to the nationally aggregated second votes (subject to thresholds), and then, each party’s seats are allocated to the states in proportion to their contribution to the party’s total national second votes. My understanding is that under this system, each state's number of seats is not fixed before the election. Instead, difference in voter turnout rates can change each state's representation. Is it correct?

By Steve Z · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original post and revision history. HTML converted to plain text; no images or linked-page content copied.

How does the media determine the number of eligible voters in a state? ↗

According to the Texas tribune: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/04/texas-2026-primary-turnout-democratic-republican/ turnout in the primary yesterday was as follows: But the 18.7 million eligible voters seems really low to me, given that the population of Texas is approximately 32 million. How was that 18.7 million determined?

By Nate · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original post and revision history. HTML converted to plain text; no images or linked-page content copied.