
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 5, 1993                   TAG: 9305050127
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

WHO VOTED? 9.5 MILLION ARE MISSING

Simple math shows 104,552,736 votes were cast in last year's presidential election, roughly 55 percent of voting-age Americans. Yet a new Census Bureau survey says 114 million people, or 61 percent, voted.

So are 9.5 million people lying?

The government would never speak so harshly of its own citizens. So the new Census report, based on a household survey and released Tuesday, put it this way:

"Some persons who actually did not vote were reluctant to so report, perhaps because they felt it was a lapse in civic responsibility."

Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate said about 1 percentage point of the discrepancy can be attributed to voters who cast ballots in November but did not vote for president. "The rest is simply over-reporting," Gans said.

Still, Jerry Jennings, the author of the Census report, said that the "1992 election may be the beginning of a reversal in the declining voter turnout of the past three decades."

by CNB