The U.S. Census Bureau recently released their report on voting and registration in the 2006 election, “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2006. There’s a lot of interesting data and analysis in the report, including:

• 48% of voting-age citizens voted in the 2006 midterm election, the highest turnout estimated by the CPS since 1994.
• 96 million people voted in 2006, an increase of about 7 million since 2002.
• 81% of voters said they voted on election day, 19% said they voted before the election (5.8% in person, 12.8 by mail).
• Of the non-registered, nearly half (47.6%) said they didn’t register because they are not interested in politics; the next highest frequency response was “did not meet registration deadlines”, at 14%.
• Of the registered non-voters, 27.3% said they were too busy, 12.4% were sick or disabled … and 3.9% cited registration problems, and 2.5% cited inconvenient polling places.