The Anti-Electorate: 3 of 4 Californians Stayed Home

Forget the Democrats nominating a woman for governor. Forget the OK for higher gasoline taxes. The loudest statement made in last Tuesday’s election came from the quietest, but biggest, bloc in California politics.

Its message: We don’t care.

This group is the estimated 14 million eligible adults who chose not to vote in the primary, a historic high that dwarfs the 4.9 million Californians who did vote.

These non-voters--the anti-electorate, if you will--have outnumbered voters in every California primary election since 1938. But only in the last decade has voting in June elections become an oddity practiced by such a small minority, in Tuesday’s case about 25% of the state’s eligible adults.

Percentages can sometimes be misleading when it comes to voting. But, based on raw counts provided by Secretary of State March Fong Eu, the 4.9 million votes cast was the lowest total in a primary since 1960, when California’s population was only 15 million--half what it is today.

Experts point to the lack of exciting races on the ballot, especially for Republicans, who had no contest for governor. Also, the share of registered voters who do not belong to the two main parties--and thus have little incentive to vote in primaries--has nearly doubled since 1976.

Laws that require voters to register with their county a month before the election--and that cancel the registration of anyone who moves or skips a general election--are also blamed for discouraging turnout.

But Tuesday’s was not the first dull primary, and registering has, if anything, become an easier thing to do in California in recent years. Even those who have studied the anti-electorate for years said they are unable to completely explain the trend.

“No, I don’t know what’s happening,” said Raymond E. Wolfinger, professor of political science at UC Berkeley.

By the usual reckoning of election turnout, only 39% of the state’s 12.9 million registered voters cast ballots. That is, 61% of those registered did not vote. That was the highest percentage of registered voters to shun the polls since the 1928 primary and the most for a gubernatorial contest since the secretary of state began compiling records.

But since the official turnout tries to include only the fraction of potential voters who bothered to register, it is not as telling as the tally that found the election was actually ignored by 75% of eligible residents--whether registered or not.

The more dramatic number is based on Eu’s estimate that 19.1 million Californians of voting age were U.S. citizens, 18 or more years old, and legally entitled to register and vote.

With the anti-electorate swelling, the remaining pool of people who vote has become an elite group that is more educated and aware of political issues than the rest of the population, says I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, which studied voters on Election Day.

For instance, even though California has turned into a melting pot of cultures and the white population of European heritage is only minimally the majority, the Democrats who voted on Tuesday were 72% white, mostly college-educated, and 58% worked in white-collar or technical careers. The Republican electorate was even more rarefied, Lewis said.

Among experts, skepticism abounds about the accuracy of the state’s numbers, even if there is little disagreement that voting in California primaries is on the decline.

Prof. Wolfinger cautions that the numbers for voter registration are padded with the names of voters who have moved on or died. He says the padding is higher than ever now because county registrars no longer automatically remove people who do not vote.

“There’s always been a lot of deadwood (on the rolls), but now there’s a lot more,” Wolfinger said.

He also contends that the secretary of state’s calculation of 19.1 million people eligible to register is also inflated because of the difficulty in removing non-citizens, who cannot legally register and vote. Both types of errors would skew the numbers to make it appear fewer people were voting.

But the Eu’s office says that it weeded out about 2 million non-citizens and felons--who also are often ineligible to vote--to arrive at its estimate of the potential voting population.

Bruce Cain, associate director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, says that the accuracy of registration figures has improved as more counties switch to computerized voter rolls. “That problem is being solved, to some degree,” Cain said.

Cain said that voting has declined in part due to the young, who are less likely to register and vote. Turnout percentage dropped when 18-year-olds won the right to vote and has not rebounded, he said, and overall the pool of eligible voters is younger than in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Another factor, some say, is a declining sense of voting as a civic duty. Studies have found that people increasingly regard voting as unimportant. Unless people have a personal stake in the outcome--say, aides to a senator who would lose their jobs if the boss were defeated--they are much less likely to vote.

“Strictly speaking, for the average person, it’s not rational to vote since the probability of you affecting the outcome is practically zero,” Cain said.

Wolfinger, who has been writing scholarly books and papers about non-voters for more than a decade, said that turnout could increase by as much as 9% if the requirement for re-registration for those who move was eliminated.

That could be easily done, he says, by something as simple as forwarding a copy of postal change-of-address forms to election officials.

But Richard Brody, a professor of political science at Stanford, says the bottom line is that people do not care enough to vote.

“People don’t vote out of neglect, basically,” he said.

THE WINNER: APATHY Who voted on Tuesday: Eligible to register and vote: 19,132,860 Registered: 12,981,429 Voted: 4,901,185 Democrats Registered: 6,453,186 Voted for Governor: 2,477,275 (38%) Republicans Registered: 5,072,331 Voted for Governor: 1,969,014 (39%) Others Registered: 1,455,912 Voted for Governor: 454,896 (31%) The Anti-Electorate in primary elections for Governor June 1974 Non-Voters: 8,495,625 Voters: 5,128,375 June 1978 Non-Voters: 7,815,999 Voters: 6,843,001 June 1982 Non-Voters: 10,012,974 Voters: 5,846,026 June 1986 Non-Voters: 12,419,059 Voters: 4,937,941 June 1990 Non-Voters: 14,231,675 Voters: 4,901,185