California saw voter turnout of 75 percent

Three out of four registered California voters cast a ballot in the November election, the highest rate of participation since the 2008 presidential election, state data show.

Friday was the deadline for counties to finish counting and report their official results to the secretary of state’s office. It reports that just over 14.6 million ballots were cast in California, or 75.3 percent of the state’s 19.4 million registered voters.

Turnout this year among registered voters was up 3 percentage points from 2012, but it fell four points short of the participation rate in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected.

This year, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 62 percent of the vote in California, defeating Republican Donald Trump by 4.3 million votes to win the state’s 55 electoral college votes.

California saw a surge in registered voters in the months before the election, when the voter rolls swelled to a record high, but it’s too soon to know whether those new voters ended up casting a ballot, said Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project at the University of California, Davis.

Turnout among all eligible

adults was 58.7 percent, just short of the 59.2 percent participation rate in 2008. Political scientists consider the eligible participation rate a better measure of civic engagement because it accounts for voters who never register.

Getting close to the 2008 participation rate makes this a good year for California, Romero said, but California’s eligible-voter turnout looks like it will still fall in the bottom 20 percent of states.

Because it’s not a swing state in the presidential election, California doesn’t see the sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations that help boost turnout in states that have closer contests for the top-ofthe ticket candidates, Romero said.