No, that is not necessarily true. V**er turnout is a percentage of those eligible to v**e who then actually do v**e. It has nothing to do with how many v**ers are eligible or what their social standing is. If you have a sum total of 2 v**ers, and one declines to v**e, then you have a 50% v**er turnout. If you have 100 million v**ers, and 50 million decline to v**e, you still have a 50% v**er 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 v**er 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 e******n become a farce? Clearly a v**e from such a minority of v**ers could not be considered a mandate by any stretch. It's the old question, "what if they held an e******n and no-one showed up to v**e?"

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