Maggie Hill waited in line for nearly 10 hours to vote for John Kerry. She skipped field hockey practice and ate pizza and cookies delivered to hungry students by their professors.

“You gotta stay with it,” Hill and her classmates at Kenyon College told one another, as hundreds of them sprawled in the community center in Gambier, Ohio, playing board games, chatting and waiting for one of only two voting booths.

While few young voters had such a tough time at the polls Tuesday, more than 20 million Americans under 30 took the initiative to vote — resulting in a 51.6 percent turnout for that age group, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at the University of Maryland.

CIRCLE researchers based their calculations on exit polls done for The Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6 million voters and more than 9 percentage points from exit poll data from the 2000 election.

The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

Turnout increased among other age groups, too, leaving young voters with roughly the same proportion of the total electorate nationally as in 2000. But activists who were part of an unprecedented effort to get out the vote — from Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself to the Youth Vote Coalition — felt that didn’t detract from their accomplishment.

“To have beaten the ’92 number is incredible,” said Ivan Frishberg of the nonpartisan New Voters Project. Back then, Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush.

This time, young voters were the only group that favored Democrat Kerry. The AP’s exit polls found that under-30s favored Kerry over Bush, 55 percent to 44 percent, compared to a 48-46 edge for Al Gore in 2000.

Kenyon students Carolyn Lewis, left, and Chloe Wilson, right, play cards while waiting in line to vote with friends to pass the time Tuesday in Gambier, Ohio. Under-30 voters came through in big numbers this year, with more than 20 million casting a ballot for president. The turnout bested their 2000 showing by more than 9 percentage points and heartened activists who worked to get young voters to the polls.

While exit poll data provides an early look at young voters, more detailed and definitive information about the youth vote — provided by the Census Bureau — will be available next year, said Carrie Donovan, the youth director at CIRCLE.

Still, experts who track the youth vote say that the initial data shows politicians should take young voters more seriously.

“I think at the end of the day, if you’re looking for new voters, young voters will emerge as the best bang for the buck,” Frishberg said.