Study Finds South Dakota Has Worst Voter Representation in Nation

The election is tomorrow and most of us cannot wait until it is over! The obnoxious tv ads, intense social media posts and unwanted phone calls from candidates have simply stressed all of us out.

Will you be heading to the polls in order to cast your votes? Well, according to a study by Wallet Hub, South Dakota will have the worst voter representation on election day.

Now let me explain: this does not mean that the number of South Dakotans who vote will be the lowest in the nation. It means that the people who are voting on election day are `not representative of our state’s population as a whole.

What does that mean? Our voting pool is not diverse. The same ‘types’ of people are the ones with the largest voting outcome, which is not representative of everyone in the entire state.

For example, here’s a hypothetical situation: Say the majority of our voters are middle-aged women. Well that ultimately doesn’t represent everyone in our state, such as men, millennials and so on. Men and women, as well as different age groups and races would generally have different opinions on specific topics.

The study found their scores using statistics from the 2012 presidential election. They specifically looked at age, race and gender. The score percentage is out of a possible 100, with a score of 100 representing the lowest variation between the state voter distribution and state population distribution.

The study says that South Dakota's voter representation lands at the bottom at #50, with a voter representation index of 73.10. The state of Virginia is #1 with a voting representation of 92.51. Their voters most accurately represent their state’s demographics as a whole.

When you break it down and look at all three key demographics used in the study, here's what they found in South Dakota:

- Overall Representation: 73.10%
- Racial Representation: 41.84%
- Age Representation: 79.29%
- Gender Representation: 98.18%

So while we may have a decent voting turnout overall, we need more diversity at the polls in order to accurately represent our state and the various demographics that live here.

When it comes to neighboring states, we are surprisingly quite far behind. Iowa comes in near the top of the list at #14 with 88.84 and Minnesota came in at #19 with 88.53. North Dakota is #33 with 84.13.