In advance of yesterday's primaries, some electoral anxieties of a slightly new variety.

Some analysts say fears about the coronavirus could affect voter turnout.

We're going to see a lot of very aggressive hygiene habits at the polls.

In the end, over 3. half million people voted. No appreciable

decline in turnout there. Though, of course, the virus's impact is still relatively limited here

in the U.S. and even under the best of circumstances, over 40% of American citizens don't vote. In fact, in November 2016, around 100 million eligible voters

passed. That's more people who voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. And it might be

even more than that, since non-voter statistics seem often to be underreported.

Aiton Hirsch, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts, was an academic advisor on a new Knight Foundation study,

The 100 Million Project, the untold story of American non-voters.

It was the largest survey of chronic non-voters in history, and it overturns some age-old conventional wisdom. I think there's a group of

folks who think that the non-voters are disproportionately Democrats, disproportionately minorities,

disproportionately people who are not voting

because of a lot of logistical burdens that they might have, that, you know, the actual voting

and registration process are difficult. I think that's one conventional view. I would say the

conventional view among political scientists is a little bit different. It's that non-voters and voters

are not as different as you might think. Let's talk about non-voters. Who are they? Right. These are

people, if you look over a set of elections, like six elections, you know, maybe they voted in one,

but not more than one. So they routinely fail to vote in big national, you know, federal elections.

And the way that we did this survey is that we separated those who have been in the electorate

long enough to have engaged in those elections, but chose not to.

And those are the non-voters.

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