ELECTIONS / VOTER TURNOUT : Lower Projection Tied to Negative Tactics

Ventura County’s top election officials predicted Friday that voter turnout in Tuesday’s primary elections will be lower than expected in part because of negative campaigns in several key races.

Richard D. Dean, county clerk and recorder, said he thinks voter turnout Tuesday will be about 45%, or 5% lower than he previously expected, because candidates are concentrating more on belittling opponents than on political issues.

“There has been a lot of hit mail,” Dean said. “Negative campaigns are a turnoff for voters.”

Bruce A. Bradley, the assistant registrar of voters, said the negative campaigning is in part the result of a dependence on television advertising to convey campaign messages.

“Unfortunately, the focus they take is the negative one because it is easier to do in 30 seconds,” he said. “I don’t know where the candidates stand in this campaign so much as I know what negative things they have said about the other person.”

Late hit mail and other last-minute campaign mailers this week flooded the U.S. Postal Service’s mail processing center on Colonia Road in Oxnard, which serves as the county clearinghouse for bulk mail.

Ron Quintana, manager of mail processing, said that from Monday through Thursday, the center had processed 560,000 pieces of political mail, nearly double the normal bulk mail volume.

One candidate in an area Assembly race sent out a mailer with a report card showing an incumbent opponent with the grade “F” in the category of integrity. Another candidate for Congress depicted an incumbent in a television ad as a pig feeding at the public trough.

Meanwhile as Dean was criticizing negative campaigns, Madge L. Schaefer, a candidate for the 37th Assembly District, was challenging Dean’s ethics on grounds that he contributed $500 to the campaign of her opponent, Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi.

“It creates an ethical question because there is a tremendous need for the (elections) division to have not only the appearance but the fact of neutrality,” Schaefer said.

Dean countered that his right to contribute to a candidate is guaranteed under the First Amendment.

“Only a very cynical person would say that because a person holds an opinion it would color the performance of his job,” Dean said.

Dean announced the 45% voter-turnout prediction at a press conference called at the County Government Center on Friday.

In addition to negative campaigning, Dean said the prediction is based on the fact that voter registration rolls have not been systematically purged of inactive voters since 1976. Prior to that, voters were dropped from the list if they did not vote in the previous election, he said.

In the 1976 presidential primary, Ventura County voter turnout was 74%, but turnout dropped to 69.5% in the 1980 presidential primary. By 1984, it had dropped to 43.9% and in 1988 the turnout was 44.9%.

“But I don’t think we will drop any further than the 45% because with reapportionment, we have some wide open races with lots of competition,” Dean said. “In the past, when the districts were gerrymandered, we had incumbents just walking into office.”

The predicted 45%, revised down from the 50% predicted earlier this week, is still slightly above the 44.3% turnout expected statewide.

Before 1980, Ventura County voter turnout was consistently higher than the state turnout, voter records show. But statewide turnouts have ranged from half a point to five points higher than Ventura County turnouts since that election.

The 1992 primary election in Ventura County also marks the one with the largest percentage of absentee voters, elections officials said. Of the 320,665 registered voters in Ventura County, 36,300 requested absentee ballots.

Of those, officials predict that about 30,900 will return ballots. That would account for about 21.4% of the expected voter turnout, the largest percentage of absentee voters ever. The percentage of absentee voters has steadily climbed by about 3% in each of the past four major elections, Bradley said.

With a larger number of voters expected to participate in the general election in November, officials said they expect absentee voters to more than double to about 72,000 for that election.