State Official Predicts 62% Registered Voter Turnout

Secretary of State Bill Jones predicted Wednesday that 62% of California’s registered voters will cast ballots Nov. 3.

That would be an increase of 1.5% over the last gubernatorial election, in 1994, and mark the highest turnout in a gubernatorial election year since 1982. That year, 69.7% of the state’s registered voters went to the polls.

Jones said the absence of an incumbent in the governor’s race and a hotly contested campaign for a U.S. Senate seat were factors in his projection of an increased turnout.

But he acknowledged that the biggest factor is a statistical one. Over the past year, voter registration rolls have been purged of 850,000 names of people who have died or moved.

Removal of such “deadwood” shrinks the universe of registered voters and automatically makes the turnout percentage grow. Jones said the cleaner rolls could account for a turnout increase of 4 percentage points.

Moreover, his prediction is for registered voters, ignoring the millions of Californians who don’t bother to register.

When the turnout prediction is calculated as a percentage of adult citizens who are eligible to cast ballots, the figure is 44.6%.

A spokesman for Jones said the secretary of state prefers to calculate turnout based on registered voters because that universe of people can be more accurately counted.

To count the larger pool of eligible voters, officials must obtain the number of Californians 18 and older and then subtract noncitizens and incarcerated adults, who are not allowed to vote.

“It’s a much more difficult, tenuous calculation,” the spokesman, Alfie Charles, said.

Jones also released figures showing that there are nearly 15 million Californians registered to vote in the election. About 350,000 of them have been added to registration rolls since the June primary.

Democratic registration in the state is 47%, and Republican registration is 36%. Thirteen percent of voters declined to state a party affiliation. The rest belong to smaller parties.