Voting in 1944

Report Outline
Electing a National Administration in Wartime
The Right to Vote in a Democracy
Volume of Voting in National Elections
Special Focus

Electing a National Administration in Wartime

With millions of citizens in the armed forces, most of them abroad and many of them fighting in remote corners of the world, and with other millions involved in large-scale migrations to war production centers, the presidential election of 1944 promises to be held under conditions entirely novel in American history. Even if peace should have been restored in the Pacific as well as in Europe before the election, a good part of the electorate would still be in a state of unsettlement.

No presidential election was held during American participation in World War I, At the peak of its military strength in that war, the United States had 4,800,000 men in the Army and Navy. By the summer of 1944, according to estimates of the War Manpower Commission, the armed services will have absorbed 11,300,000 men and women, of whom, at a rough appraisal, some 9,000,000 will be of voting age. With these millions widely dispersed, and with millions of civilians away from their home districts, full exercise of the franchise in 1944 will meet with unprecedented difficulties.

The congressional elections of 1942 gave a first reflection of these conditions, although at that time the American armed forces numbered only about a third of what they will total in November, 1944. The vote cast for all candidates for Congress in 1942 showed a falling off of upwards of 40 per cent as compared with that polled for president in 1940, and it was 8,000,000 less than the vote cast in the last previous off-year election in 1938. The vote was the smallest registered in any national election in twenty years.