Information on voter turnout is crucial when studying electoral behavior in liberal democracies. Most of these analyses are based on turnout questions stemming from survey research. The problem of using survey data is that they might not reflect the actual behavior of the respondents: respondents overreport on turnout, meaning that they report turnout but did actually not vote. Taken this further, analyses based on this data might produce biased results and conclusions. There have been several attempts to reduce overreporting by introducing new ways of question wordings and a more extended list of answering options. These forms have been tested successfully mostly in the US, but also in the Austrian context recently. However, social desirability bias and memory errors – two possible reasons for vote overreporting – are known to be sensitive to the survey mode and the time that has passed since the last election. But also national context variables such as the general level of turnout in the last election are of relevance. Thus, in this paper we study how the different ways of question wordings work in different contextual settings and which impact this has on comparative survey research. To do so, we conduct a survey experiment (web survey) including the usual turnout question and two new question forms in 7 European countries in November 2011. Our analyses (1) allow us to define, if and how far former results on reducing overreporting in the voter turnout question can be generalized to different settings, and (2) draw our attention, if and how models explaining reported turnout might be biased, if overreporting is not reduced.