Experts divided on cause of falling voter turnout

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer

In the heady political cauldron of 1960s Hawai'i, union officials drove field workers to the polling sites in the pineapple and sugar towns across the newly minted state, helping generate voter turnouts never since equalled.

Few voters in District V encountered a line earlier this year when they went to the polls in a special election held to replace former City Councilman Andy Mirikitani. Participation in such elections is declining. Advertiser library photo

Issues were big, real and in your face, whoever you were.

People cared.

And they voted.

By 2000, statistics suggest they no longer did — certainly not as much.

Hawai'i had the lowest voting turnout in the 2000 general election of any state in the country — an unprecedented decline. Just four out of every 10 Hawai'i residents old enough to vote showed up at the polls.

Even among those who went to the trouble to register, fewer than six out of 10 actually voted. Only four other states and the District of Columbia had a poorer turnout among registered voters.

There is no consensus about why that's so, although there are plenty of guesses.

It is popular to talk about voter apathy, but Dwayne Yoshina, head of the state Office of Elections, doesn't buy that.

"I don't think we have voter apathy," Yoshina said. "We have people who make active choices not to vote, not to participate. Everybody I talk to, they usually give me an excuse why they don't vote. Everyone has a reason why they haven't registered or not voted, which indicates to me that at least some thought went into it."

University of Hawai'i political science professor Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller argues that people in power may not be pushing very hard to give non-voters a reason to vote, since the small existing voter list is the one that put them into office.

"Professional politicians don't see it as a problem, although they give lip service to it," Goldberg-Hiller said. "It's a threat to them, and it's much more in their interest in keeping tight control over it."

For some Hawai'i residents, such as many sovereignty-minded Hawaiians, the choices available in modern elections may not be acceptable.

"I suspect that there's quite a few people out there who feel they have no stake in the system ... You've got a lot of Hawaiians out there who are not going to vote," said Noenoe Silva, a UH political science professor specializing in Hawaiian issues.

Gov. Ben Cayetano said he believes Hawai'i's election system is already "one of the best you'll find anywhere." To improve voter turnouts, there needs to be more voter education, plus a better effort by candidates, he said.

Cayetano, whose battle with Republican Linda Lingle in 1998 led to a voting spike that drove turnout to more than 400,000 for the first time, agreed that it is up to the politicians. "The turnout will depend on the excitement created by the candidates," he said.

State elections officer Yoshina cites suggestions by others that candidates have lost touch with voters.

"Since about the 1960s, the popular press has always said that there is this ongoing lack of political leadership," he said. "It's been written about time and again. There seems to be a disconnect between the people and the political sector."

That would also seem to be borne out by the French example. In an election with record low turnout in April this year, arch-conservative presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen ran a close second to President Jacques Chirac. The result shocked moderate and liberal French voters, who turned out in daily massive protests against Le Pen, a candidate with a history of neo-fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant activism.

They turned that fervor into ballots. In the general election, 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, and Le Pen was defeated 82 to 18 percent, giving Chirac the most lopsided win ever by a French presidential candidate.

The British are also bemoaning low voter turnouts, after the 2001 election saw record low numbers.

"Perhaps the single most important issue arising from the 2001 general election is the need to address, urgently and radically, the decline in public participation," said a report of the British Electoral Commission, as reported by the BBC.

But the reported numbers for both the French and British turnouts of the past year were far higher than the turnout in the U.S. presidential election of 2000.

The Federal Elections Commission reported that 196,511,000 Americans could have voted and 146,211,960, or 75 percent, registered. And of these, 96,456,345 voted in an election that hinged on about 500 votes in Florida that resulted in George W. Bush's presidency.

That works out to 49 percent of eligible Americans voting.

In Hawai'i, the numbers are even worse. Just 40.9 percent of the 909,000 Hawai'i residents of voting age went to the polls.

Yoshina, while he concedes the voting numbers are bad, argues that they're not quite as bad as the statistics suggest. For one thing, several factors inflate the actual voter pool in Hawai'i, he said.

Of those 909,000 listed residents of voting age in 2000, many are non-citizen immigrants who can't vote, and some are transient military folks who don't vote in local elections.

"Our actual eligible voter count was around 780,000 in 2000," he said. But other states have immigrants and military activities in varying numbers, so it is not clear how much impact that would have on Hawai'i's ranking among the states.

Republican governor candidate Lingle, the former head of the statewide GOP, employs audience participation to make a point about voter participation.

She has the whole audience stand up. She asks one third of the room to sit down, representing those who never registered. She asks a third of those remaining to sit, representing those who registered but did not vote. And then she asks half of the rest to sit, representing those who voted for an unsuccessful candidate.

The remainder, just 20 to 30 percent of the audience, actually elects the winners in Hawai'i, she said.

In many ways, it's like sitting down at a lunch counter with nine strangers, and having two of them do the ordering for all 10. What are the odds you'd get something you actually want? Worse, what's the likelihood you'll get something you hate?

It's not like Hawai'i hasn't been innovative in finding ways to clear the path to the voting booth, Yoshina said.

Hawai'i had mail-in voter registration before Mainland states did. The Islands have had a statewide unified voter registration system since the 1980s. Voter registration forms were available at motor vehicle registration offices — a program called motor voter — before most Mainland areas. Verizon, the phone company, has printed voter registration forms in the fronts of phone books for the past 10 years.

"We've removed a lot of the so-called impediments to voting, but that hasn't really improved the participation rates," Yoshina said.

Political scientist Goldberg-Hiller said it's still a quirky system.

"The United States has more bureaucratic rules about registering than most countries. Many countries let you register at the polling place" on election day, he said.

"There is a fear that if we loosen up regulations, there will be massive voter fraud. But there is no evidence of that in other countries. Fraud certainly exists, but if you look at what's going on in Florida, for example, you have a long history of fraud" that uses regulations to inhibit voting by certain classes of people, Goldberg-Hiller said.

Yoshina doubts that simplifying voting alone will make the difference.

"I like to think that the solution to this is a much wider one than just our offices," Yoshina said. "It's gotta be societal. It's got to include political parties, candidates, the various government institutions and agencies, the Department of Education or other education institutions. It's gotta include the citizens.

"People have got to believe that they've got to exercise their right and responsibility to participate."

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.