One of the popular talking points for the Democratic presidential candidates has been the topic of income inequality.  Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have called for adjustments to the minimum wage... adjustments that would be designed to infuse more money into the hands of people on the lower end of the economic scale.

Recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) appeared in a nationally televised interview and spoke about not only income inequality, but how that translates into voter turnout.  Specifically, Sanders said this:

"Well, because poor people don’t vote. I mean, that’s just a fact, that’s a sad reality of American society. And that’s why we have to transform one, as you know, one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major society of Earth. We have done a good job of bringing young people. But in America today, the last election in 2014, 80 percent of poor people did not vote."

Our partners at PolitiFact decided to see if Sanders was accurate regarding the claim that 80 percent of poor people didn't vote in 2014.  PolitiFact reporter Joshua Gillin says that Sanders' claim rates MOSTLY TRUE on the Truth-O-Meter.  Gillin says that it's all about the parameters you set to fit your definitions.

"The trick of this claim, of course, is how you actually define just who 'poor people' are," said Gillin.  "For example, if you look at people who are making less than $10,000 per year, it's about 75 percent of those people who didn't vote.  If you change the parameters and include everybody who makes less than $30,000 per year, then that number drops to 69 percent."

So the question is... with all of those numbers floating around, how did Sanders get to 80 percent?  The answer is, again, how you choose to define who "poor people" are.  "The way that Sanders got his number was to define 'poor people' as those who have 'financial instability,' rather than define it by a dollar amount," said Gillin.  "Now, what does 'financial instability' really mean?  That's defined as the people who don't have checking accounts, who don't have any kind of bank account or savings account, who don't have retirement accounts, and are basically living a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle.  Using those parameters, about 80 percent of that block of people did not vote in the last election."

While Sanders did correctly cite a statstic that was used to define a block of the voting population, he would have been more accurate to describe their situation, rather than just labeling them "poor people" and letting people determine what that actually means on their own.  Because the claim lacks clarity of how "poor people" is defined, PolitiFact rates this claim MOSTLY TRUE on the Truth-O-Meter.

 

SOURCES: Poor people voting in 2014