Voter Turnout Affecting
Future of Nation
By JERRY SCHWARTZ AP April 11. 2004
In the crowning rite of democracy, more than 100 million Americans will join
together to make history this November - to elect a president. But a lot more
won't. Some are under 18, and can't vote. But many others just don't.
When the world's democracies are ranked according to their voting records, America
is at the bottom, with Switzerland.
Books with titles like "The Vanishing Voter" and "Where Have
All the Voters Gone?" give voice to an increasing unease that something
fundamental is amiss - that Americans are caught in some sort of electoral death
spiral. That democracy itself may be at risk.
There is some dispute about the extent of the decline, but in the last two elections,
only about 24 percent of the adult population cast their votes for George W.
Bush and Bill Clinton. A democracy whose leaders are the choice of less than
a quarter of the adult population faces some hard questions:
Can a government that is of and by only a fraction of the people truly work
for all the people? And is there any way that a nation of distracted denizens
of the 21st century can be transformed into a nation of voters?
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After the 2000 election, amid all the controversy about hanging chads and butterfly
ballots, little attention was paid to reports that 51.2 percent of Americans
of voting age had voted, up from 49.8 percent four years before.
This was not considered cause for celebration. As recently as 1960, 62.8 percent
of Americans of voting age had turned out to elect John F. Kennedy over Richard
M. Nixon in a nailbiter. Through the 1960s, turnout hovered in the 60s, but
in 1972 it plunged to 55.2 percent. With some exceptions the decline has continued
since.
"We are in the midst of the biggest progressive and generational decline
in participation in our history," declares Curtis Gans, director of the
Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a Washington voting advocacy
group.
Political scientists Michael P. McDonald and Samuel L. Popkin don't see it that
way. Traditionally, turnout has been calculated simply, as a ratio between the
number of people who voted and the number of Americans of voting age. But McDonald
and Popkin say that includes people who actually CAN'T vote - non-citizens and
felons. Since 1972, both groups have grown.
Excluding those groups, they say, voter turnout for the last eight elections
has averaged about 56 percent, bobbing up and down with no real downward trend.
But there has been no upward trend, either. Thomas Patterson, director of the
Vanishing Voter project at Harvard University, says experts long assumed that
voter turnout would increase when education and income rose.
They have - and it hasn't.
Curtis Gans has made voter turnout his life's work. He offers a long list of
reasons why so many Americans don't vote:
The decline of the family farm and small-town America. Stressful lives, longer
commutes. Declines in newspaper reading, civic education and party allegiance.
Too many television channels - and too much television, period, except when
it comes to meaningful political coverage, when there is too little. Long, tedious
and nasty campaigns in which candidates seek to energize their own followers
instead of trying to engage others. An erosion of faith that government cares
about or can solve our problems.
But not everybody agrees that alienated Americans are necessarily nonvoters.
Two University of Nebraska political scientists, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and
John R. Hibbing, looked at surveys and material from focus groups and found
that Americans' distrust of politicians often results in more voting, not less
- that they vote to keep a short leash on government.
The fact is, the line between voters and nonvoters is not necessarily a sharp
one.
As Mark N. Franklin, a political scientist at Trinity College in Connecticut
points out, turnout varies from election to election. And a lot of people who
vote in presidential elections do not vote in primaries or local or midterm
elections, when the turnout is usually far, far lower.
"Presumably, it is not something about those citizens that makes them more
likely to vote in certain elections than in others," Franklin writes.
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Experts have prescribed all sorts of changes in the system of American elections.
We could move elections to weekends or holidays, or extend voting hours. We
could allow voters to register on Election Day, as they do in Minnesota and
five other states.
None of these proposals address a central concern: Many races have been drained
of competition; parties use computers to redistrict in such a way that the outcome
is inevitable, and voters sometimes see no reason to vote.
"In the state of California, there are 53 districts," says Thomas
Patterson of the Vanishing Voter Project. "How do you carve up the whole
state so none of them is competitive? That to me is pure cynicism. But that's
what they did."
The parties do work to register voters - but voters of their own ilk. The Republicans
want to register 3 million voters this year, and they've deployed an 18-wheeler
full of computers and video games and plasma TVs to do it.
Reggie the Registration Rig rolls across America to "bring new people into
the party," says Republican chairman Ed Gillespie, "especially young
people."
The Republicans see young nonvoters as a source of party growth; nonpartisan
groups see them as a hole in the fabric of democracy.
While 70 percent of Americans 25 and older voted in 2000, according to the Pew
Charitable Trusts, only 42 percent of younger Americans went to the polls; other
estimates are even lower.
The fear is that today's young nonvoters will never develop the voting habit,
dooming the United States to generations of low turnout.
Rock the Vote uses celebrities like the Dixie Chicks and Kid Rock to convince
the young that "voting is cool," says political director Hans Riemer
- that if they vote, their voices will be heard on issues ranging from the job
market to education.
The young are not the only ones who do not vote; fewer than a third of Hispanics
and Asians cast ballots in most elections. That has consequences, especially
in local elections, says Zoltan L. Hajnal, a political scientist at the University
of California, San Diego.
In an as-yet unpublished study, Hajnal finds that higher minority turnout one
year means more municipal spending in line with minority interests the next
year - spending on things like health care and education.
Too often, that turnout doesn't materialize. But maybe it doesn't have to be
that way.
In Boston, a city that had never elected a Hispanic to citywide office, registration
and get-out-the-vote efforts had been sporadic and often self-serving - one
group or another trying to boost its chances.
A nonpartisan group, Boston VOTE, had a different idea. In 2000, it began to
enlist nonprofit organizations in a voting advocacy network that would focus
on black, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods and work relentlessly, in election
years and every year.
Eventually, 140 groups signed on, and with Boston VOTE's help, each began to
promote voting. A patient at a health clinic might receive registration forms
upon departure; an immigrant trying to learn English might also be taught the
mechanics of voting; a resident might find a card hooked to his doorknob, offering
nonpartisan information about the candidates.
Last Nov. 5, the work paid off. Turnout in Hispanic, black and Asian precincts
rose by more than 75 percent, and Felix D. Arroyo - Puerto Rican-born, the first
member of his family to earn a college degree - was elected to an at-large seat
on the Boston City Council.
There was celebration, sure. But the next day, Boston VOTE went back to work.
"This is democracy," says program coordinator Atiya Dangleben, "365
days a year."