What are the real voting stats? And have the numbers really gone up that much?

Question

Looking at the previous election results pages, I see:

This election ended Feb 2 '11 at 21:00. 
3,834 voters were eligible, 566 visited the election, and 310 voted 
SysAdmin1138 and MarkHenderson elected

and

This election ended Jan 24 '12 at 20:00.
6,350 voters were eligible, 1,361 visited the site during the election, 
474 visited the election page, and 208 voted
voretaq7,  Chris S,  Iain elected

But for the current election, there are already 456 people who've earned the Constituent badge (by voting). Was there some cross-site promotion of the election this time? Or are there really a lot more people active on the site this time around?

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There's another odd thing about the totals in the (large) screen shot below, it shows 972 Constituent badges have been awarded. That's about right: 208 + 310 + 456 = 974 (Caching, or timing of when I counted 456 explains the small discrepancy) So how come a ton of people apparently voted twice???

Never Mind:

I just realized all the dates are the same: 8 jun 12, so the badges for the first two elections are all lumped together.

Answer 1

I should also note that as of right now, 1643 eligible voters have visited the site during the current election, 282 more than visited during the entire course of the previous election... However, a whopping 1137 have visited the election page, which is 663 more than showed up last time around. So there are more potential voters hanging around and more of them are taking time to check out this whole "election" thing.

At least two things have changed since the last election:

1. The total number of eligible voters has gone up considerably.
2. We send each eligible voter a notification now when voting starts.

Last time around, we were still just running a banner across the top of the site for the duration of the election. It was certainly eye-catching, but... After a while, folks start to ignore it. Given there's an entire week where (unless you plan to run or want to critique the candidates) you can't do anything on the election page, getting folks' attention during that second phase is pretty important.

Answer 2

Assuming January 2011 as a baseline:

• Jan 2012 had approximately 94% of the site traffic of January 2011
• May 2013 had approximately 210% of the site traffic of January 2011

So the site has more than doubled in traffic since January 2012, so it seems reasonable that the number of votes has increased as well. Plus I believe most voting happens in the first 48 hours or so, votes for the rest of the week will only trickle in.