No, that is not necessarily true. Voter turnout is a percentage of those eligible to vote who then actually do vote. It has nothing to do with how many voters are eligible or what their social standing is. If you have a sum total of 2 voters, and one declines to vote, then you have a 50% voter turnout. If you have 100 million voters, and 50 million decline to vote, you still have a 50% voter turnout even though the difference in actual numbers is 49,999,999.

My muse in quoting those statistics was to wonder what would happen if the voter turnout kept declining as it has been over the last 200 years or so, taking it down to somewhere around 3%. At what point does an election become a farce? Clearly a vote from such a minority of voters could not be considered a mandate by any stretch. It's the old question, "what if they held an election and no-one showed up to vote?"

If we increase the number of eligible voters and keep the same participation rate, then yes, more eligible people failed to vote. Just because they were made eligible doesn't necessarily mean they wanted to vote. If the rate comes down then less people voted and if the rate goes up then more people voted, as a percentage of the total number of eligible voters. If more people are made eligible to vote and the participation rate goes down, there may still be the same number of actual voting participants (depending on the ratios) but because the numbers have risen, the ratio goes down. Is this making any sense to anyone besides me?