Lake Research Partners x VPC/CVI: Research on Voter Participation Among Underrepresented Communities in 2024

The Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI) partnered with Lake Research Partners to study voter participation among “Underrepresented Communities” – including people of color, young people, and unmarried women –  in the 2024 election.

Our goal: to better understand who voted, who didn’t, and why, so we can continue closing registration and turnout gaps in future elections.

VPC and CVI are non-profit, non-partisan organizations dedicated to increasing civic engagement and closing voter registration and turnout gaps. Since 2003, we have helped register millions of voters—particularly among historically underrepresented groups—and continue to run the nation’s largest mail-based and digital voter engagement programs. What we learned will inform the work that VPC and CVI will undertake in our digital and mail programs, which will reach tens of millions of Americans in 2025 and 2026.

Key takeaways include:

● Compared to 2020’s record-breaking turnout among young voters, 2024 saw a wider gap between Underrepresented Communities’ vote-share versus their share of the voting eligible population (VEP).

● Non-voters among Underrepresented Communities cited top reasons for not voting as
being too busy or not interested.

● Unregistered adults among the Underrepresented Communities were more likely to have missed voter registration deadlines.

● Members of these communities move about twice as often as the general population, making voter registration harder to maintain.

● Non-voting rates were higher among voters of color than among white voters.

● There is a significant gender gap among Black and Latino/a voters, with men being more likely to sit out the election.

Attached below are a memo and a presentation that outline our full findings.