By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Page Editor

With the election year heating up, there's been increased attention to voting, or more specifically: How to get folks out to vote.

Advertiser staff writer Jan TenBruggencate has written several articles spotlighting the decline in voter participation in Hawai'i. The staff at the Office of Elections is worrying how it can do an adequate job of voter education Individual campaigns are working to maximize the "yield" of their voter registration efforts so that the people they sign up vote for their candidate and not someone else.

Every story about voter turnout in Hawai'i looks back at the post-statehood years, when voter turnout in the Islands was something to brag about. Part of this was the sheer novelty of the thing. Islanders had been without the opportunity to choose many of their own leaders. Who would pass up the chance to participate?

And part of it was sheer self-interest. Statehood coincided with a social revolution driven though the ballot box. An entrenched, pre-war political culture built around the plantation system was being replaced. In the new system, Democrats would open up society and create educational, social and — most importantly — economic opportunities for groups that had largely been shut out.

So one's vote was not simply an abstract act of participation in a political process. It was an act of choosing leadership that would provide direct, immediate benefits to you and your family. The lingering effect of this period was continuing high voter participation rates among such groups, particularly Americans of Japanese ancestry. Their turnout numbers were legendary, originally out of direct self-interest and later out of habit and loyalty.

New U.S. Census numbers may suggest that this voting pattern has disappeared. For instance, the Census reports that Caucasians have the highest voter turnout percentages of all the ethnic groups it catalogues.

That "fact" is highly misleading. First, because it reports on claimed behavior, not actual. And any politician worth his salt will tell you that while Caucasians say they did — or will — vote, the numbers on election day usually don't bear this out.

Further, the Census lumps Asian and Pacific islanders into one category, thus diluting the turnout performance of AJAs with many other groups, including more-recently-arrived Filipinos, Southeast Asians and others.

It is true that the "power" of the AJA vote is diminishing over time as younger generations forget their "roots" and instead tend to vote — or not vote — based on whether their immediate self-interest would be served by so doing.

And it is also true that the relatively lower (actual) turnout numbers for Caucasians reflect the fact that this group contains the largest percentage of new arrivals, who have yet to build a stake in the local scene .

So looking ahead to this fall's elections, the trick to restoring our voter turnout reputation seems obvious: Give people a real concrete stake, a direct self-interest in deciding who holds office, and they will turn out in huge numbers. Guaranteed.

Reach Jerry Burris through letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.