How Much Does Low Turnout Matter?

By DAVE LESHER and JENIFER WARREN

Oct. 26, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Increasingly, Americans don’t vote. We feel guilty about it, we get nagged about it, but more and more, we simply won’t--or can’t--make time for it.

Elections in some parts of urban Los Angeles this year have seen fewer than 1 in 12 potential voters making decisions for everyone.

Culturally, our anemic voting is so accepted that it’s become a punch line for Hollywood: “No, I don’t vote,” sniffs a character in the film “Wag the Dog.” “I don’t like the rooms. Too claustrophobic.”

In a week, it will be election time again. Nationally, some forecasters have been predicting turnout could dip to historic lows. California will be choosing a new governor Nov. 3, but fewer than half of the eligible adults are expected to cast a ballot.

What happens when so many people choose not to exercise their right to vote? Does our political system chug merrily onward, or begin to sputter and stall? What is the minimum electorate required to run a democracy?

A look at academic studies, campaign strategies and the behavior of incumbent officeholders yields findings that defy some conventional assumptions:

* Turnout levels may have little--if any--impact on the outcome of some elections. National surveys of each presidential race since 1952, for example, conclude in almost every case that the winner would be the same even if 100% of the eligible voters had taken part.

* Even though political competition is known to stimulate turnout, most of California’s 172 legislative and congressional districts are so heavily Republican or Democratic that the winners in a general election are essentially known before a single ballot is cast.

* Recent reforms intended to spur turnout have had little effect. Conveniences like allowing voters to register at their motor vehicle department or vote by mail have largely been used by those already participating in elections. And many other ideas that experts say could increase voter participation--such as mandatory voting--have been rejected as too drastic.

* Turnout has been declining for more than 30 years but is still higher today than earlier in this century.

Intuitively, low turnout is troubling--like a distress signal for democracy. That’s certainly what California Secretary of State Bill Jones thinks.

Three years ago, he recruited some of the nation’s top election gurus and put them on a task force. His goal was a lofty one--100% turnout by California voters. It looks as unreachable now as it did then.

“People need to understand,” the state elections chief says plaintively. “It’s not just a right to vote, it’s a special gift, bestowed to our country by our forefathers and paid for with the blood of many generations of our ancestors.”

Others worry that the young and the poor are underrepresented in government because too few of them vote, while some lament that government is increasingly under the disproportionate influence of special interests and extremist ideologues.

Shadowing the concerns over turnout is some startling research showing the people who vote almost always make the same decisions that their absent colleagues would have made had they shown up.

“Turnout in the typical partisan election almost never has any impact on the outcome of the election,” says John R. Petrocik, an election specialist at UCLA.

Studies of Elections Over 46 Years

That conclusion was not arrived at overnight. It is based on 46 years of surveying thousands of American adults before and after presidential elections. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the studies did not examine races on the state and local level. Most analysts believe a similar pattern exists there, but they don’t have the data to prove it.

Conventional thinking holds that because nonvoters tend to be poorer and younger than voters, higher voter turnout helps Democrats--traditionally, the party of the young and poor.

In truth, however, different demographic groups often vote the very same way, Petrocik says. Put simply, young voters and poor voters would select the same candidates as their older and richer counterparts more often than you might think. Even when they do vote differently, the effect on electoral outcomes is minor, researchers say. A whopping 10% jump in turnout might only produce a 1% advantage for a Democrat, scholars say.

Sometimes, of course, that 1% can be enough: “When you get down to close races, political science goes out the window,” said Ray Wolfinger, a UC Berkeley political scientist and author of the book “Who Votes.”

Indeed, political lore is brimming with tales of nail-biters eked out by just 12 or 20 or 53 votes. Take the races for state Assembly in 1996. Five seats were won with less than 1% of the vote that year, and Democrats--including Scott Wildman of Los Angeles and Sally Havice of Cerritos--squeaked out three of the photo finishes. Today, Democrats control the Assembly by just three seats.

Given such history, voter turnout is never taken lightly by strategists. This year, some see it as a critical force in California’s neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race. Democrats, in particular, fear that President Clinton’s sex scandal could motivate Republicans and depress turnout by Democrats. Sen. Barbara Boxer, facing a challenge from Republican state Treasurer Matt Fong, could pay the price.

Voter turnout also is expected to play a key role in the rematch between Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and Robert K. Dornan, the Republican who lost his central Orange County congressional seat to Sanchez two years ago. Early polls show Sanchez with a commanding lead in the race, one of the most closely watched in the country, but she won the seat in 1996 by just 984 votes. Her victory was aided by a high voter turnout in the district--46%, which was higher than the national average.

This month, the independent Field Poll predicted that 44% of the state’s eligible voters will turn out in the upcoming election--down a bit from the last governor’s election in 1994 but still higher than the one in 1990. Many Democratic campaign consultants are worried enough to double-time their outreach programs in hopes of rallying the faithful. The academic experts are more skeptical, but not prepared to dismiss turnout as a decisive factor.

“These effects are not usually very substantial,” Wolfinger said. “But if you take all of the wind out of all the sails of the Democratic campaign workers and you fill the sails of the Republican campaign workers, that can make a difference.”

That turnout invariably affects elections is not the only bit of conventional wisdom that is quietly exploded by specialists in the field. Another is the perception that low voter turnout is a modern development--one more example of the me-first generation’s indifference to responsibility.

Actually, California’s turnout in the last race for governor was just four percentage points below the average for the past century, according to the state’s official election records.

And although turnout has dropped about 10% since the activism of the 1960s (compared to a 13% slide nationwide), it is still higher today than it was earlier in the century.

Compared to other democracies, however, the United States ranks just above dead-last Switzerland in the proportion of citizens who vote. Among states, California is in the middle of the pack.

Many, like Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), believe such low participation affects government after elections. Lawmakers, he said, need to feel they are being watched. “The biggest danger to our democracy is the lack of participation,” he warned, “and voting is the first basic step.”

District Boundaries Are Key Factor

But the political reality is that more voters are a headache for incumbents. A larger constituency means more doors to knock on, more luncheon speeches to deliver and much higher campaign costs.

“You’ve got to remember the contortions that incumbents go through to try to suppress a turnout,” said Republican strategist Alan Hoffenblum. “They like having their friends voting and an electorate where they have more control.”

One such contortion involves campaign finance laws, Hoffenblum said. Despite repeated efforts, incumbent lawmakers--in Congress and the state Legislature--have scuttled efforts to reform campaign finance rules.

Perhaps the most significant contortion is reapportionment--the redrawing every 10 years of new political boundaries.

Researchers agree that competition between candidates is a sure-fire way to boost turnout. And making political districts more competitive is not a difficult task: You simply draw the lines in a way that includes a better balance of voters from each major party.

Trouble is, that job lies in the hands of incumbent state lawmakers, who frankly have little incentive to increase competition--or voter turnout.

As a result, most districts are populated by such a dramatic imbalance of Republicans or Democrats that analysts consider the seat to be safe for the incumbent party.

In California’s 172 legislative and congressional districts, the average advantage for the majority party is more than 20%. Illustrated simply, a district with 60% Democratic voters would have about 40% Republicans.

One dramatic example is Democratic Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s lopsided Assembly district in downtown Los Angeles. His party claims 65% of the district’s voters, compared with just 17% who are registered Republican. Barely 1 in 5 of the district’s voters cast a ballot in the last governor race.

Residents of such districts are not just left without a significant choice for local office; they are also virtually ignored in most elections by those who benefit from their votes. With limited resources, state political parties make their biggest efforts to activate voters in the relatively few competitive areas of the state.

In those places, occasional voters get enormous hand-holding. Dozens of volunteers, some flown in from throughout the state, walk through neighborhoods and talk with individuals. They tuck handwritten notes in screen doors. They write letters raising issues of specific interest to individual voters. They mail absentee ballot applications. And they try to seal the deal with follow-up phone calls.

“The process of dragging non-voters into the turnout is difficult . . . and it’s expensive,” said Parke Skelton, a top Democratic strategist in Los Angeles. “We will aggressively give them a phone call at about the time we think they are getting their absentee ballot, and we keep after them [until] we get a record that they turned in their ballot.”

Aside from motivating voters, electoral competition also has a profound impact on the behavior of lawmakers who win those campaigns. Democratic Assemblywoman Debra Bowen, whose coastal Los Angeles district has a razor-thin 2-point advantage for Democrats, is one example.

She is among the most active lawmakers in Sacramento and a regular at ribbon-cuttings, Rotarian lunches and holiday parades. The five assistants in her Torrance office are under orders to take any phone calls--even those regarding local problems like loud motorcycles. Instead of redirecting the caller to the nearest police department, Bowen’s office will make the call for them.

“We don’t say, ‘Wrong office, call somebody else,’ ” she said. “We find the right person.”

But Bowen said there is a trade-off for that kind of attention. Fearful of offending any group of voters that could swing an election, members “in the most competitive districts . . . tend to be more cautious,” Bowen explained. The result? On controversial topics such as taxes and gun control, lawmakers from competitive seats are reluctant to veer from politically popular positions.

Skelton believes it’s important to have some lawmakers who don’t worry about reelection and therefore have the security to take the bold positions necessary for leadership. “It’s good to have a mix,” he said.

Take Villaraigosa, whose heavily Democratic district in East Los Angeles gives him one of the safest seats in the Assembly. In this year’s budget showdown, Villaraigosa forced Gov. Pete Wilson to direct $73 million in disability and food stamp benefits to legal immigrants--a population that is not even allowed to vote.

But outgoing Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos) said bold leaders too often are actually ideologues--on the right and the left--who clog the legislative process with unrealistic ultimatums.

“In the [80-seat] Assembly, there should be 80 unsafe seats,” he said. “It would sure sharpen the concentration around here.”

Reformers contend that if turnout were higher across the board, politicians would concentrate more on the general interest of voters and less on the needs of special-interest groups.

The protection of Social Security and military benefits is a common example. When politicians tinker with those programs, “they do so with the expectation that they will hear from veterans or the elderly”--two well-organized groups of reliable voters, said Kay Schlozman, a professor of political science at Boston College. As a result, they tread very carefully when it comes to cuts or reforms in those programs.

A corollary can be seen in the federal welfare reform package passed by Congress in 1996, some researchers say. Signed by President Clinton, the package placed a time limit on welfare benefits and cut aid to legal immigrants.

“Welfare reform is a classic example of what happens when socially needy people don’t turn out to vote,” argued Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University. The merits of the package aside, neither party “had to worry about the electoral consequences, so it was painless for them in the practical sense.”

That sounds logical, but other analysts are not convinced that low turnout leads to substantial policy distortion. “I don’t think there’s a revolution in America that’s on hold because a big chunk of those eligible to vote never vote,” said Phil Isenberg, a retired Democratic assemblyman from Sacramento.

Reversing the Trend a Daunting Task

Marshall Ganz was reminiscing. His audience was a few students from his democracy class at Harvard. The topic: His days as a young political organizer--for civil rights in Mississippi, for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and for Cesar Chavez in the California farm fields.

Suddenly, a student interrupted: “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he told the professor. “But that was when politics mattered.”

Remembering the episode, Ganz conceded the youth was right: “We did think it mattered. It was a thing of deep moral consequence for us. I don’t think people believe that today.”

Ganz disputes the notion that voter turnout levels have little or no impact on elections or government. But even some scholars who accept that theory are concerned about a society--as illustrated by Ganz’s student--in which politics no longer matters.

Voting, they say, is the exercise and eating-right regimen necessary for a healthy political body. It binds us together in a common civic pursuit.

“It’s a . . . central political ritual,” said Gary Jacobson, a specialist on electoral politics at UC San Diego. “If people aren’t participating, then they’re more detached from their political community than you want them to be.”

But reversing the turnout slide is a daunting task. An August bulletin from the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 5 million registered voters said they did not cast a ballot in 1996 because they were too busy--three times more than gave the same reason in 1980. Many others are turned off by political corruption, sleaze and big-money campaigns.

So far, most recent responses to the problem have been aimed mainly at registering more voters and making balloting more convenient.

Take the National Voting Rights Act, or “motor voter” bill. Passed by Congress in 1993, the highly touted law allows people to register at their motor vehicle department as well as at other state agencies.

Backers figured if they made it easier for people to register, more of them would surely follow through and vote. But while it has added record numbers of voters to registration rolls, the law has not translated into larger crowds at the polls: “It hasn’t changed in any measurable way,” said Christopher Thomas, the election director in Michigan, the state that pioneered the motor voter program 22 years ago.

In fact, the motor voter law wound up making the turnout problem appear even worse than it is. In decades past, election officials routinely purged voters from registration lists if they had not cast a ballot in several years. The new law barred that practice.

The result in some states--including California--is that total registration numbers soared to artificially high peaks. Since registration is still a common yardstick for judging turnout, the effect of the inflated voter lists makes participation appear to drop even where voter behavior has not changed.

Another reform effort--the relaxing of laws governing absentee balloting--has also failed to produce a significant bump in turnout.

Previously, voters could use an absentee ballot only if they had a reason--like being sick or out of town. Now, in California, any voter can use them, and they have become enormously popular, accounting for nearly a quarter of the turnout in the 1996 election.

But even campaign strategists who aggressively push absentee voting doubt that it increases turnout. Instead, most believe it’s simply a case of regular voters using a new method.

Voting Compulsory in Many Nations

So what else can be done to entice Americans back to the polls?

We could follow the lead of Australia, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg and many Latin American nations, where voting is compulsory. In Greece, those who don’t vote can be jailed for a year. In Australia, no-shows are sent a “please explain” letter and fined if they fail to supply an acceptable excuse.

Such penalties are rarely imposed, but voters get the message: Turnout in Australia, for example, routinely exceeds 90%.

Arend Lijphart, a political scientist at UC San Diego, believes passionately in compulsory voting. It is not, he argues, such a radical proposition; democracies place many more onerous burdens on their citizens, from jury duty to military conscription, school attendance and the payment of taxes.

But most dismiss the suggestion that we force people to vote as a totalitarian one. Secretary of State Jones calls it “un-American.” Others warn that such a mandate could push the politically ignorant and disinterested into the voter pool.

In any event, mandatory voting has yet to win much of a fan base on American soil. Nor has there been heavy interest in another structural reform--a shift in the voting system from a plurality, or winner-take-all model, to proportional representation.

Under proportional representation--the choice of most of the world’s other major democracies--parties win seats in proportion to their share of the popular vote.

Advocates say the system brings far greater satisfaction for the electorate because each vote has a much better chance of being reflected in the legislative chamber, and would give parties besides the Democrats and Republicans a chance for representation. So far, political leaders have shown little interest in such a wholesale shift. But proponents think the time might be right. Congress is considering a bill to allow North Carolina to elect its 12 representatives by proportional representation.

Short of that, there are more modest steps that could boost voter participation, say those who study voting behavior.

Some nations, for instance, schedule elections on the weekend, when most people are not working. Others declare election day a national holiday, underscoring the social value of voting.

Along the same lines, many researchers believe Americans would vote more if they were asked to do so less often. To relieve voter fatigue, officials could run the less compelling elections concurrently with more significant ones, or turn some elected offices into appointed ones.

Another turnout builder is automatic registration, in which the government signs citizens up the day they turn 18, sparing them a trip to the post office for a registration form. Some states have essentially eliminated registration--allowing voters to sign in at the polls just before casting ballots.

Florida even has a pilot project allowing some residents to vote from out of state via the Internet. In California, Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles) pushed for Internet voting and registration, but could only win legislative approval for a study of the issue. Even that went too far for Gov. Pete Wilson. He vetoed the bill, saying Internet balloting would compromise voter confidentiality and invite fraud.

Amid the clamor over tumbling turnout are voices claiming the decline may be a sign of national contentment. When times are good, these experts say, Americans may understandably decide, “All’s well, why bother to vote?”

In that context, perhaps we might consider the words of Albert Hoffenblum. An aerospace engineer, Hoffenblum--father of Los Angeles political strategist Alan Hoffenblum--rarely voted. Occasionally, his two children would ask him what that said about his commitment to democracy.

“We used to say, ‘You know, Pop, people died in the wars for your right to vote,’ ” his son recalls.

And the elder Hoffenblum would look his kids straight in the eye and say: “They died for my right to vote. Or not to vote.”

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The Worth of Democracy

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

John F. Kennedy

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”

Jerry Garcia

“I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.”

W.C. Fields

“Democracy means simply bludgeoning the people by the people for the people.”

Oscar Wilde