This is all about voters and nonvoters, two groups of comparable size in contemporary America. Voting is the only expressly political act that an actual majority of the nation's adult citizens may undertake (if it's a presidential election). But for the 122,000,000 who did vote in 2004, an estimated 90,000,000 others did not. My question is why so many choose not to vote in a democracy that professes to hold this right dear. This one is worthy of choice as an essay option.
All texts affirm the common fact that American presidential and congressional election voting turnout declined in the period from 1960 through 2000. In 1996 and 2000 turnout T was about 50% of adults Americans aged 18-up (with 18 being the universal minimum age for voting); so nonvoters N were about equal to voters V in national number. You should first understand how turnout itself is calculated. Assume there are three entities V (voters), R (persons registered to vote, whether they did so or not), and A (American residents aged 18 up at time of a given election). Typically turnout T is the simple ratio V/A. It measures what proportion of A actually registered and then voted (with registration a precondition for voting). I've heard statements over the years from the local media citing evidence from local county registrars that T is much higher here than in the country as a whole. That's false. In fact they're measuring V/R, or proportion of registered persons who actually voted. Typically that figure in the 1990s nationally was about 70%, not 50%; so sure, a ratio of 50/70 is impressively better than 50/100. But it's all illusion from failure to know some elementary things. Local T isn't really better than elsewhere.
Michael MacDonald and colleagues present improved analyses of true voter turnout figures (Voter Turnout; also Turnout Rates for Voting graphic). Calculating this stuff is a substantial cottage industry for political scientists. It's not easy to do. We have an historically decentralized system of voter registration based on 3053 county registrars who keep more-or-less accurate current lists of registered persons who are eligible to vote there. If you care to be added to that list, it's your right, but they typically don't look for you. You go to them; and I have links above this article's title for doing so. Anyway, by Tuesday after the first Monday in November for the general election, the select arrive at the designated neighborhood election site. They go in and pull out their voting cards with signatures on hand to compare to the alphabetized list of registered persons with addresses in that particular ward or precinct. The computer or the volunteer election worker checks you off, you pick up a ballot, go behind the curtain, vote in 5 minutes time, and on the way out, you can pick up an "I voted" sticker.
But don't go next door to another precinct in hopes of voting twice! They won't have you on the list, and you cannot "vote early and often" in corrupt 19th century fashion. Our county-based 20th century registration was instituted to promote honest voting; we leave stacking the ballot box to American Idol with its alleged 63 million votes cast in 2006.
Here's what MacDonald shows. The Turnout Rates for Voting graphic has an increasing discrepancy as we approach today between VEP (voter-eligible population) and VAP (voting-age population, equivalent to my A above). That's because we now have an estimated 12,000,000 resident illegal aliens plus some large number of resident legal aliens. A class of adult resident non-eligible persons of this magnitude is new; so we've relied in the past on using VAP to figure out voting turnout T where T=V/A. But now we see that it's far better to use VEP in the denominator. I'll now add a new term C for voting-age non-felon citizens and use that in the denominator; a revised T=V/C.
This raises turnout over the old data. But we still have many millions of nonvoters, as MacDonald shows. We still lag near the tail end of modern democracies for our low turnout in the most important national election (that being the presidential one, held once every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November of leap years or their equivalent intervals). But now we've got a better picture of where T truly is.
The Cost of Voting Top; Next Down
Text Ch. 6 says millions of persons do not vote because it costs more than it is worth. That's right. Yet I have frequently been told that voting is a simple act requiring only that someone be eligible (citizen non-felon of at least 18 years age), be registered (in the county where you live, by the county registrar), know where your precinct or ward election site is, and go there (between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on that Tuesday, if you're a State of Missouri voter). How can someone object to doing something so easy?
My reply is that voting is not cheap or easy at all. Understand first that voting is not a purely private act even though a citizen is personally responsible for getting registered and finding the poll site and casting a vote. It is a complex social act, part of an elementary American civic ritual taught to us from childhood as an essential part of democracy. Citizens know they are unlikely to ever make the singular difference in the election's outcome, yet they participate rather like a figurative contributor in a vast tug-of-war between comparably sized teams pulling for different outcomes. We have to be taught to think like this. Voting is a collective act in pursuit of a collective good. There is always the option to free ride, leaving the task to others while counting on them to keep a democracy operating.
Here's why voting isn't cheap: it's all about getting information and using it. Consider taking examinations in online Southeast classes. One gets on the computer, goes to the UTest site, takes the test in an hour's time, and awaits results posted on Grade A. How easy and simple that is. But of course, that's not the half of it. The real problem is figuring out how to perform decently or well. That demands preparation time via acquisition of information. Consider a colleague of mine who regularly performs at campus orchestral concerts. His performance time is a mere 2 hours or so plus the usual transit of self and cello to Academic Hall. Easy, you say. But perhaps you'd care to inquire how much advance practice, thought, and devotion he must commit before sitting down in the pit! It's scary to tally that up.
And that is my point: the true cost of voting is figuring out what to do in the booth. And in the U.S., it's also figuring out how to register. Now that's simple, you may say. You go to the county registrar during working hours; or you get solicited on campus to register on the spot; or you get invited to do so at the local automobile and driver's license site. Sure, sure; but in Missouri and most other states that's normally done at least a month before the November election itself! How many among you truly pay mind to a task a month beforehand? If "not many," perhaps you sympathize with citizens who see an election is imminent and then discover that they're unregistered in that city or town or county. Sorry, friend; you are not among the select.
Now you may see why registered Rs numbers only about 70 percent of adults A; they were tripped up by our county tripwire against overly enthusiastic would-be repeat voters.
And you may also see why political parties have a long-standing and central part in American public life. These parties have helped beleaguered citizens figure out how to vote in simplified fashion. Once many years ago in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Speaker of the House Thaddeus Stevens was confronted with deciding which of two competing partisans should be seated as a new Representative. That meant deciding who had actually won a murky southern election contest in which many an abuse apparently took place. Summoning his colleagues for information, he was told "They are both scoundrels, sir!" "Well, which one is the Republican scoundrel? Give me the Republican scoundrel!" thundered the Speaker. And that solved the case on the spot.
For you, it means a shorthand way of figuring out which candidate stands for what, and better yet, which camp of fellow travelers he or she will sit down with. You have need of both these things to make your own informational problem soluble in reasonable time. If both be scoundrels, or saints for that matter, what of it? Vote for the one affiliated with your party. You don't have a party? Well, look next below.
If you believe party's not important, try this exercise in your spare time. Await a local nonpartisan election for city council or school board; then get a newspaper or attend candidate debates to see who stands for what; peruse their credentials (heavily weighted with who belongs to the right civic organizations); and make your decision in confidence that you know what you're doing. It costs a lot, and it feels perilous! This is the real cost of voting! It explains why so few stockholders vote on Boards of Directors or on legalese and financial mumbo governing the direction of the public firm; it is damned hard to figure out what's right to do. Information is costly. As university students, you already know that; just apply your awareness of that to voting.
If low voting turnout were an easy problem to solve, we might have done that already. Let's consider how to solve it. We'll find some easy solutions, some hard ones, and a couple of things that probably admit of no solution at all.
First is how not to solve it. Don't bother to say "the government needs to do something." Actually it doesn't; government already has a lot to do and can get on with it whether T rises or not. Or "the politicians need to do something"; that's closer, but it depends on their motivation. Their main motivation is to compete for office and win a plurality of the vote. Subscribing nonvoters to become voters would be nice, but they're far too busy and too limited in resources to do that effectively. Besides, they'd only try this if it helps them directly. Raising turnout has to help them win. So don't expect a southern Republican hard-line conservative to urge the citizens of the local black Baptist church to register and to vote. Expect that only of the Democratic candidates! Likewise, local Democrats will not urge every pew of Lynnwood Baptist Church in this city to register and vote. You can guess why after reading text and Fiorina on cultural conservatism, religious fundamentalism, and Republican advocacy of traditional morals.
Here's another non-solution: absentee voting. Absentee voting procedure has a powerful link to low voter turnout, not high. It burdens the typical citizen with a mysterious and time-consuming process in advance of the election. It can solve some individual's problem if he or she is away from home on election day and cares deeply about local issues and candidates. But nationwide, most people in the VEP are close to home, and more interested in large state and national office than local ones. No; absentee voting is a way to induce low T, not high. If you still want to adhere to absentee voting, then combine it with a procedure to allow advance voting by mail, as Texas and Oregon have done in recent years. That probably has alleviated any serious need for a separate absentee procedure.
For those who are young, there's a temptation to prescribe remedy by teaching them in high school that voting is important. I am personally thankful for not having to do that job and be accountable (under some new twist of No Child Left Behind testing protocols)! It's rather tough to get high school students to care about anything in the political system when they sit daily in places that lack meaningful elections of their own. A promissory note that one day in the future, you'll care about voting? That's as far off for someone aged 17 as the eventual benefits of burning a credit card and putting the saving into a college fund for her future children; it can happen, but I wouldn't count on it too often.
And another: wow, let's all vote on the web! That presents problems of identifying participants and avoiding ballot-box stuffing that have not come close to solution. Maybe for your children, but not for right now. Those familiar with "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Public Opinion Polling" will recognize that we're not close to solving these problems in calendar 2007.
And the last and worst non-solution: scolding the 80,000,000 who could have voted but didn't. That's basically a waste of time. Shaming someone for a failure isn't very useful unless her chance to straighten out comes up soon. With national elections, that period is two years or four; far too long for shaming to work. Besides, the reasons for nonvoting are many, and prescribing this single remedy is akin to grabbing one hammer to do every job in constructing a house. Tailor the solution tools to the specific problem.
Now on feasible solutions. First, we know one way to dramatically improve registration rates, because nearly every European and other non-American democracy already does it. That's to create a national list of eligible citizens and automatically register them all, with address or addresses aligned to local voting sites. But alas, that collides with our election administration by 3051 separate counties and 50 distinct states (with election management for each residing with its Secretary of State office). We in the U.S. had long relied upon antiquated and often anti-technological county registrars to handle this, and it has not worked very well in recent years except to exclude those who might not belong as voters in that county. We're also averse to going to any singular national registration list because that breaches privacy concerns, and if Social Security and Veterans' Administration listings be an indicator, a single large information loss to online scam artists would be sufficient to terminate the plan. We're much too distrustful of centralized power to permit a truly effective comprehensive citizen list. It's actually a good idea, as the 9-11 Commission recognized; but don't look for one before 2010 at the earliest.
Second, demand this of the counties: produce your lists of eligible citizens at the statewide level, and download that database to the county registrars. That'll take time, cost money, and produce wrenching requirements that some old-fashioned registrars learn how to use computers. But it's underway in the private sector, and overdue in the public one. Besides, there's already a Motor Voter program underway to boost registration by offering that service to persons who register automobiles. That's valuable because it "follows the mobile voter" to any new town and address; and the most mobile persons tend to be either young, or fairly poor, both categories were voter T is very low. We might add a young person's component to this, since low T is notoriously aligned with being aged 18 to 25. Citizens upon reaching age 18 could get a "you're registered" designation from the local registrar in conjunction with high school rites of passage such as graduation. It might also reinforce the sense that citizenship is important.
A third thing that can be done once modernized county handling of voter information is in place: go to election day registration in more states, including Missouri. The northern states of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Maine already do that. This action alone is worth an approximate 9 percentage point boost in turnout T (using VAP; but change to VEP should not change this boost by much).
Fourth, and while we're on Election Day, we should ditch the blind adherence to tradition that has us voting on a Tuesday of a work week. What common sense does that make? Either make that Tuesday of November 2 through 8 a national holiday sans work and classes, like our Thanksgiving; or better yet, just do weekend voting like the rest of the civilized world does. I say it's all right to look at foreigners who have higher turnout than we, and borrow from their books. The American way is sometimes blind tradition with little else; and this is such a case.
Please note that up to now, my solve-it proposals address how to administer registration and elections. It hasn't addressed the citizens and the politicians and the parties. That part is a whole lot harder to solve.
Please do not invoke the claim that politicians "need to address the concerns of young citizens." Those who seek election need to woo voters, not nonvoters. So long as young adults vote at low rates, politicians will need other people more than the young. All political campaigns seek out voters-to-be above nonvoters. What is more, the highly polarized 2004 and current political climate is one that induced both major parties to emphasize mobilization (getting your natural support to show up) almost exclusively; but they have virtually given up on conversion (getting non-supporters or active enemies to become supporters). This party preference leaves young uncommitted persons on the sideline. Politicians won't need the young until after their low T problem is resolved. And besides, the national issue of low T does not cover young citizens only, but rather all citizens. Most adults aren't young; they are middle-aged or older. Our issue here is overall low T, not solely youthful low T.
But political parties and their slates of candidates do care about turnout. They had a recent success of no small dimension in this respect. That's the 2004 election, which compared to 2000 saw a positive jump of nearly 17,000,000 voters to more than 122,000,000 in all (Dave Leip's Atlas - 2000 Presidential Election Results compared to 2004 Presidential Election Results; MacDonald, United States Elections Project 2004 compared to United States Elections Project 2000; Renka, The Election of 2004). Two crucial things were involved in this: intensive mobilization of likely supporters by both the Democrats and the Republicans, and a widened ideological gap between those with the President and those opposed. People either liked George W. Bush pretty well, or they were thoroughly alienated from him. He was "a divider, not a uniter" (Jacobson 2006). For that matter, President Bill Clinton had been a lightning rod on the emergent cultural divide of the parties in the 1990s--but apparently not in time to spur fully successful mobilization by both parties (Fiorina 2005). By 2004 the divide was there and was evident in the bitter tone of the campaign (Sabato 2006). Earlier evidence had shown that much decline in voter T since 1960 is laid at the parties' door for failing to mobilize citizens (Rosenstone and Hansen 2003). The parties in the most recent completed presidential election cycle got the message, went to work, and succeeded in getting almost 6 voters to the polls in 2004 for every 5 who attended the 2000 event.
Parties trust and seek out citizen partisans with the correct party label. That leaves out the hefty proportion of Americans who are independent; but many of them lean to one party or the other. Rather like those not in church but inclined to be, they are ripe picking for mobilization campaigns. When parties are easily distinguished by issue platform and commonplace identity, the citizen's information cost is greatly reduced. Both those conditions held forth in 2004, and turnout went up a lot.
There's still the citizen attitude toward public life to consider. The key variable here is something called efficacy. Political efficacy is the belief that your civic voice is important, and that it will be heeded by those in authority (Rosenstone and Hansen 2003, 141-145; Abramson, Aldrich and Rohde 2006, 97-99). It has an internal component (your ability to understand politics) and an external one (responsiveness of the political world to you). This psychological attribute matters a lot in defining who votes. Efficacy is an attribute of those with education and, a little less clearly, those with money and occupational status. The American poor are famously low in political efficacy, especially in recent decades with the sense that neither Republicans nor Democrats rely on poor and downtrodden people for election to office. Low efficacy is not the same as anger or alienation from politics (alienation not being affiliated with low T), but its effect is to distance such persons from meaningful participation in civic affairs. That disengagement is visible during school years in empty PTA meetings at lower-income towns and neighborhoods. High civic efficacy persons are ones who believe it's a right and duty to vote--and to otherwise participate in civic business when the occasion calls.
I have no ready solution for those with low efficacy. I don't pretend to know how to fill PTA meetings in low-income neighborhoods. People near the bottom of the American economic ladder aren't going to miraculously rise to great success through sudden epiphanies about the power of collective action. Smaller victories can be had; sometimes in our history we've seen uprisings by truly downtrodden people led by creative political leaders; the southern black civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King is our most famous example. But mass movements are not likely to work completely to remedy low efficacy.
So that's it: make it easier for people to register,
and reduce their cost of voting by having the parties come to the citizens.
Seek to foster higher efficacy somehow, but don't hold your breath or bet the
farm on it. Will some folks completely resist all this and still not vote?
Yes, of course. There's only one remedy to get them out: issue
Italian or Australian-style fines for those who don't show at the designated
booth on Election Day. But that is plainly not the American way--although
I truly hope one enterprising state of our 50 will someday try this out as a
civic experiment. If they do, I plan to vote.
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Works Cited
Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde. 2006. Change and Continuity in the 2004 Elections. Washington D.C.: CQ Press.
Fiorina, Morris P., with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope. 2005. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Education, Inc.
Jacobson, Gary C. 2006. A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People. New York: Pearson Longman.
Leip, Dave. Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, 2000 Presidential Election Results and 2004 Presidential Election Results; accessed at http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2000&off=0 and http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2004&off=0 respectively.
McDonald, Michael P. 2005-2006. Voter Turnout; accessed at http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm. Also Turnout Rates for Voting graph, accessed at http://elections.gmu.edu/turnout_rates_graph.htm. Also United States Elections Project 2004 compared to United States Elections Project 2000, accessed at http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2004.htm and http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2000.htm.
Renka, Russell D. 2004. The Election of 2004. Accessed at http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/renka/Renka_papers/election_of_2004.htm.
Rosenstone, Steven J., and John Mark Hansen. 2003. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Longman Classics.
Sabato, Larry J. 2006. Divided States of America:
The Slash and Burn Politics of The 2004 Presidential Election. New York: Pearson Education, Inc.
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Copyright©2007, Russell D. Renka