Voter Roll ‘Deadwood’ Clouds Precise Turnout for Election

As predicted, voter turnout in Tuesday’s elections appeared to be an all-time low, state officials said.

Just 59% of registered voters participated in the election, Secretary of State March Fong Eu estimated. The exact figure will take some days to compute.

The previous record low for a gubernatorial election was 44 years ago, during World War II, when 59.26% of the registered voters cast ballots.

Effect of ‘Deadwood’

But there may be a catch in all the 1986 election discussion over low turnout. In the last decade, the state has taken steps to make it easier for Californians to register and more difficult to “purge” them from the rolls when they are inactive. Caren Daniels-Meade of the secretary of state’s office said that between 7% and 9% of the voter rolls these days are therefore “deadwood”--people who no longer live at the address where they are registered.

If these non-existent voters were not counted, the turnout of 7.4 million voters might more accurately reflect a turnout in the range of 64% “if we had clean voter rolls,” Daniels-Meade said.

Still, this would be lower than four years ago and is likely to keep experts busy for some time trying to guess why.

“It’s total speculation; there is no empirical evidence,” said Eugene C. Lee, director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. “There is a lot of conventional wisdom that it was all the negative campaigning or the polls (which predicted lopsided outcomes weeks in advance in some key races).

“But perhaps the most important phenomenon is that there wasn’t an overriding economic policy issue that drove the campaigns.”

Differences by County

There were dramatic differences in the turnout county by county. The secretary of state’s semiofficial canvass showed San Diego set the pace for apathy, with a 51.3% turnout. By contrast, 73.6% of registered voters turned out in the Sierra foothill county of Calaveras.

In other Southern California counties, the semiofficial figures showed the turnout was 58.4% in Los Angeles, 59% in Orange, 55.6% in Riverside, 54.6% in San Bernardino and 57.1% in Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Officials said the final canvass will show an increase of about 1% in each of these totals.