Dropping turnout of voters has truth, myths

In the crowning rite of democracy, more than 100 million Americans will join together to make history this November -- to elect a president.

But a lot more won't.

Some are under 18 and can't vote. But many others just don't.

When the world's democracies are ranked according to their voting records, America is at the bottom, with Switzerland.

Books with titles like "The Vanishing Voter" and "Where Have All the Voters Gone?" give voice to an increasing unease that something fundamental is amiss -- that Americans are caught in some sort of electoral death spiral. That democracy itself may be at risk.

There is some dispute about the extent of the decline, but in the last two elections, only about 24 percent of the adult population cast their votes for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. A democracy whose leaders are the choice of less than a quarter of the adult population faces some hard questions:

Can a government that is of and by only a fraction of the people truly work for all the people? And is there any way that a nation of distracted denizens of the 21st century can be transformed into a nation of voters?

Percentage drops

After the 2000 election, amid all the controversy about hanging chads and butterfly ballots, little attention was paid to reports that 51.2 percent of Americans of voting age had voted, up from 49.8 percent four years before.

This was not considered cause for celebration. As recently as 1960, 62.8 percent of Americans of voting age had turned out to elect John F. Kennedy over Richard M. Nixon in a nailbiter. Through the 1960s, turnout hovered in the 60s, but in 1972 it plunged to 55.2 percent. With some exceptions the decline has continued since.

"We are in the midst of the biggest progressive and generational decline in participation in our history," declares Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a Washington voting advocacy group.

Political scientists Michael P. McDonald and Samuel L. Popkin don't see it that way. Traditionally, turnout has been calculated simply, as a ratio between the number of people who voted and the number of Americans of voting age. But McDonald and Popkin say that includes people who actually can't vote -- noncitizens and felons. Since 1972, both groups have grown.

Excluding those groups, they say, voter turnout for the last eight elections has averaged about 56 percent, bobbing up and down with no real downward trend.

But there has been no upward trend, either. Thomas Patterson, director of the Vanishing Voter project at Harvard University, says experts long assumed that voter turnout would increase when education and income rose.

They have -- and it hasn't.

Curtis Gans has made voter turnout his life's work. He offers a long list of reasons why so many Americans don't vote:

The decline of the family farm and small-town America. Stressful lives, longer commutes. Declines in newspaper reading, civic education and party allegiance. Too many television channels -- and too much television, period, except when it comes to meaningful political coverage, when there is too little. Long, tedious and nasty campaigns in which candidates seek to energize their own followers instead of trying to engage others. An erosion of faith that government cares about or can solve our problems.

But not everybody agrees that alienated Americans are necessarily nonvoters.

Two University of Nebraska political scientists, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and John R. Hibbing, looked at surveys and material from focus groups and found that Americans' distrust of politicians often results in more voting, not less -- that they vote to keep a short leash on government.

The fact is, the line between voters and nonvoters is not necessarily a sharp one.

As Mark N. Franklin, a political scientist at Trinity College in Connecticut points out, turnout varies from election to election. And a lot of people who vote in presidential elections do not vote in primaries or local or midterm elections, when the turnout is usually far, far lower.

"Presumably, it is not something about those citizens that makes them more likely to vote in certain elections than in others," Franklin writes.

Prescription for change

Experts have prescribed all sorts of changes in the system of American elections. We could move elections to weekends or holidays, or extend voting hours. We could allow voters to register on Election Day, as they do in Minnesota and five other states.

None of these proposals address a central concern: Many races have been drained of competition; parties use computers to redistrict in such a way that the outcome is inevitable, and voters sometimes see no reason to vote.

"In the state of California, there are 53 districts," says Thomas Patterson of the Vanishing Voter Project. "How do you carve up the whole state so none of them is competitive? That to me is pure cynicism. But that's what they did."

The parties do work to register voters -- but voters of their own ilk. The Republicans want to register 3 million voters this year, and they've deployed an 18-wheeler full of computers and video games and plasma TVs to do it.

Reggie the Registration Rig rolls across America to "bring new people into the party," says Republican chairman Ed Gillespie, "especially young people."

The Republicans see young nonvoters as a source of party growth; nonpartisan groups see them as a hole in the fabric of democracy.

While 70 percent of Americans 25 and older voted in 2000, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, only 42 percent of younger Americans went to the polls; other estimates are even lower.

The fear is that today's young nonvoters will never develop the voting habit, dooming the United States to generations of low turnout.

Rock the Vote uses celebrities like the Dixie Chicks and Kid Rock to convince the young that "voting is cool," says political director Hans Riemer -- that if they vote, their voices will be heard on issues ranging from the job market to education.

The young are not the only ones who do not vote; fewer than a third of Hispanics and Asians cast ballots in most elections. That has consequences, especially in local elections, says Zoltan L. Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

In an as-yet unpublished study, Hajnal finds that higher minority turnout one year means more municipal spending in line with minority interests the next year -- spending on things like health care and education.

Too often, that turnout doesn't materialize. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

In Boston, a city that had never elected a Hispanic to citywide office, registration and get-out-the-vote efforts had been sporadic and often self-serving -- one group or another trying to boost its chances.

A nonpartisan group, Boston VOTE, had a different idea. In 2000, it began to enlist nonprofit organizations in a voting advocacy network that would focus on black, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods and work relentlessly, in election years and every year.

Eventually, 140 groups signed on, and with Boston VOTE's help, each began to promote voting. A patient at a health clinic might receive registration forms upon departure; an immigrant trying to learn English might also be taught the mechanics of voting; a resident might find a card hooked to his doorknob, offering nonpartisan information about the candidates.

Last Nov. 5, the work paid off. Turnout in Hispanic, black and Asian precincts rose by more than 75 percent, and Felix D. Arroyo -- Puerto Rican-born, the first member of his family to earn a college degree -- was elected to an at-large seat on the Boston City Council.

There was celebration, sure. But the next day, Boston VOTE went back to work.

"This is democracy," says program coordinator Atiya Dangleben, "365 days a year."