Skepticism is always good.
Looking over their site I see little to fault. The methodology is defined at the bottom of this page.
http://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/voter-turnout
They partner with ACE, the UN, Bridges on providing information about the state of elections and Democracy, ie transparency.
Constitutionnet.org considers them positively http://www.constitutionnet.org/event/international-idea-intensive-fellowship-constitution-makers
Perhaps for their own reasons the MSM has again been snowing us for their masters’ purposes to demoralize and fragment our resolve?
They have a Political Finance database as well.
The IDEA can be directly accessed at:
http://www.idea.int/political-finance/index.cfm
I don’t know man, it seem like a pretty huge data outlier. Just search around to different places and compare.
But you are right about skepticism in general and I’m not dismissing any possibility. So lets ask ourselves what reasons would there be for a mass conspiracy effort to hide voter apathy by falsifying voter turnout numbers or what reasons would there be to hide voter participation by falsifying voter turnout numbers?
In my gut I am thinking the simplest solution is that the folks who care about politics and participate have a tendency to simply over estimate the number of people who care as much as they do. I suspect there is a large number of folks who simply have no political philosophy they can rationally articulate.
FReegards