In spite of the abundance of statistics delivered by the news media last night, this information didn’t get much attention.

• About 325 million people live in the U.S., and about 25 million of us are under 18 years old, so 300 million people are old enough to vote.
• Adding the Clinton (59 million) and Trump (59 million) totals, that’s 118 million.
• So: less than 120 million people in the U.S. voted for the two mainstream candidates.
  • 60 percent of people 18+ DID NOT VOTE for either of these two candidates.
• Add-in the not-much-mentioned Johnson (4 million) and Stein (1 million), and the total vote is up to 125 million.
• So: the new President of the U.S. was voted into office by less than 20 percent of U.S. citizens 18+ years old.

According to The New York Times, 200 million U.S. citizens were registered to vote in the 2016 election (that is: 1 in 3 Americans are not registered). And, apparently, 75 million people who were registered decided not to vote. Hence, 178M U.S. adult citizens were the majority group in this Presidential election.

Sometimes, I wonder whether adults are more effective voters than children–most children spend their days learning, and some of what they learn is about choosing a leader. If we add 25 million children, then over 200 million U.S. citizens (out of 325 million U.S. citizens) did not vote in this election.