[EL] How serious is this problem?

Tue Jan 19 10:35:07 PST 2016

In 2014 I was a member of the City of Los Angeles Commission on Municipal Election Reform. Our charge was to delve into the causes of diminishing voter turnout and review way to reverse the trend. As a member of the research committee of that commission, I participated in the review of studies and reports from throughout the nation and interviews with scholars and elections officials. One conversation that has stuck in my mind was with a clerk in a Texas county that had particularly low voter turnout for municipal elections, usually no greater than 11%. We discovered that this county never sent out sample ballots or any other material before its elections. When we asked why, we were told it was because turnout was so low it didn’t seem worth the expense of mailing materials to all registered voters when so few were going to turnout. We also discovered situations in which multiple jurisdictions would conduct elections on the same day but did not consolidate their activities. So, a school district might send out certain material to voters while the overlapping city did not. We talked with political consultant and activists as well as scholars who told us the materials in those instance often arrived at different times and it appeared voters thought they were receive redundant information, not realizing there were different jurisdictions conducting concurrent elections. In short, the administration of elections across the U.S. is a mess. Local elections officials tend to believe the way they do things is the best way and everyone else is wrong. Often they treat information about candidates as if it were some kind of secret, refusing the make such information available to the press, the political parties and others in the name of “protecting the privacy” of the candidates. Even here in California, which is a fairly well-run state as far as local elections are concerned, it is left to individual county clerks and registrars of voters to make their own rules. So, we see a wild variety of operations, even to the point of different schedules and methods of releasing the vote totals and election results on election night. So, your situation does not come as a surprise to me. You seem to have been the victim of all of the above and more. 

Larry Levine

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Larry Sanger
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2016 9:50 AM
To: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: [EL] How serious is this problem?

All,

I'm new to the list. Apologies if this is covered in the archives...

I'm a "concerned citizen" without training in law or political science (my Ph.D. is in philosophy). I'm just interested in the following special issue. I was talking to a list-member about the problem and he recommended I check this list out.

I'm trying to understand a problem I encountered last Nov. 4: not being able to find my complete ballot, in advance, including all down-ballot races. I live in an exurb of Columbus, Ohio, in a mostly rural county.

The problem: There were races on my actual ballot that I never saw on the sample ballots I found, I couldn't do my due diligence and make my mind up about the candidates before I stepped in the voting booth. My immediate reaction was: WTF? How is this even possible?

I'm trying to find out how widespread and serious this problem is.

(In case you're curious, here's how it shook out for me. I had moved from a locality that sent voter guides regularly to one that did not. I knew an off-year election was coming up, so I looked on vote411.org <http://vote411.org>  and Ballotpedia and a few other places for what would be on my ballot. I even went to the county Board of Elections website (Fairfield County, Ohio), but I couldn't find my ballot there. It turns out it was there, but the procedure for extracting it from the website is so arcane that I couldn't figure it out.)

It turns out that not even the Columbus Dispatch (which I had neglected to check out) had all the downballot races on my ballot; the Dispatch lacked a library board race as well as two or three judgeship races, and possibly something else. The other ballot lookup sites had even less information. Ballotpedia had my school board races, but vote411.org <http://vote411.org>  didn't even have that, and neither had my township trustee race.

After my shock at having spent hours doing my due diligence, only to discover that I couldn't vote on the down-ballot races (not honestly), which I hadn't known about, I started checking out the problem. I ended up calling the guy who lost the township trustee race. I asked him if he felt disappointed that many if not most of the people who went to vote in the election didn't even know that an election was taking place. He said he tried to get the word out, but to little avail. I asked if he thought it was a failure of democracy, and he replied that he thought it was a failure of bureaucracy; we concluded by agreeing that bureaucracy had failed democracy.

Here are some of my questions for the experts on this list; any help would be greatly appreciated:

*	Have I somehow misunderstood the situation? Is this somehow not a problem after all?
*	Just how widespread is this problem? For what percentage of the American public is locating a complete ballot, including all down-ballot races, a serious challenge (as it was for me)?
*	I grew up in a locality that supplies a fine voter's guide. This isn't a problem there. Where is it a problem? (Maybe rural or semi-rural places, like mine?)
*	How do local candidates feel about this problem? Surely they realize it is a problem...when it is.
*	And more of a philosophical question: In your expert opinion, does this represent a serious failure of democracy?
*	And if so, why haven't we solved it??
*	Where can I read more about this problem or otherwise get insight?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Larry Sanger

-- 

Larry Sanger

Email: yo.larrysanger at gmail.com <mailto:yo.larrysanger at gmail.com>   Twitter: @lsanger <http://t.sidekickopen36.com/e1t/c/5/f18dQhb0S7lC8dDMPbW2n0x6l2B9nMJW7t5XYg1q0NXdW2z90Hq4WrZxbVQJSG056dCt0f7H_Mz-02?t=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Flsanger&si=6419420541091840&pi=9674916d-f5fb-4315-ed38-c939b8f70df7> 

Blog/personal homepage: http://www.larrysanger.org

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