Yeah, I thought you might have meant the 168.3 was total votes cast in that election, not total eligible voters. Taking 66.6% participation to be ~2/3, then total eligible voters should be 3 x 168.3/2 = 252.5 million or a bit more than 3/4 of the total population. That in itself gets my attention as it would mean only 1/4 of the US population is under 18, which seems a bit on the low side to be healthyDoh! You are correct.... that's what I get for mixing Wiki participation percentages with Census eligible/registered/voted.
And I should have noticed the "extreme" result... and checked my work.
The math is simpler, '08 Obama received 52.9% of the vote and Biden recieved 51.3%, so Biden under-performed Obama by 1.6%.
THE NUMBER OF VOTES, is due to the growth in voting age population and increased registrations and actual voting participation.
ETA: My original post doesn't allow editing to strike through and credit BugI for flagging my mistake... I guess older posts cannot be edited.
Citizens 18 and older Registered to vote Voted 2008 via census 206,072,000 146,311,000 131,144,000 2020 via census 231,593,000 168,308,000 154,628,000
Percentage of those registered who actually voted went up 3+ points, too - 89.6% for 2008 and 91.8% for 2020. I might try to get the numbers of total voters in senate races to see how well those totals match the presidential vote totals. One indicator of suspicious voting patterns would be a high number of ballots with only the presidential vote marked
As far as the time limit on editing, I think it has gotten shorter. It used to be a couple of days and now it is definitely a lot less than 24 hours