Columnist Ken McCall: Change in law, apathy reasons for low voter turnout

Ken McCall

Monday, Nov. 18, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

THERE'S BEEN MUCH gnashing of teeth this fall about low voter turnout.

Numerous stories have documented the relentless decline in the percentage of citizens who actually cast ballots.

Any way you look at it, voters not voting isn't healthy for democracy.

But some election officials and experts say the news isn't as bad as it seems.

Why? Because the National Voter Registration Act changed the rules.

The federal law, which took effect the beginning of last year, did two things that some say are driving down turnout figures.

First, says Doug Lewis, director of the nonprofit Elections Center, the law required states to offer voter registration at motor-vehicle departments and social-service agencies.

"All of the sudden," says Lewis, whose center offers assistance to elections officials across the nation, "you reached out and registered a whole lot of people who haven't been voting -- and still tend not to vote.

"Now they're registered, but they didn't vote anyway."

It's a good thing to get new people into the system and voting, and Lewis isn't complaining, but it does lower the voter turnout percentages.

The shoe that's still dropping -- and the one that's going to cause problems, Lewis says -- is the change in handling inactive voters.

It used to be that states could drop registrations if a piece of election mail, such as a sample ballot, came back for any reason.

In fact, says Registrar of Voters Kathryn Ferguson, when she came to Clark County in 1993, the state was purging voters if they didn't vote in a federal election.

If that seems a bit extreme, the federal law over-compensated.

Now, says Assistant Registrar Peggy Karmazin, the county has to get two pieces of returned mail before they can even move voters into the inactive category. Then they have to carry the inactives for eight years before they can be dropped.

Any time during that eight-year period, inactive voters must be allowed to vote if they show up at their old precinct.

The idea was to prevent voters from being disenfranchised, but Lewis says, like many laws, it is having unintended effects.

The effects will continue to build as time passes, he says, if the law isn't changed.

"It was not a major problem in this election," Lewis says, "but after we've run four more general elections we will have more registered voters than people who are eligible to vote."

In Clark County, for example, there are 38,414 inactive voters, just more than 8 percent of the total registration. If you drop them out of the equation, the county's turnout was 61 percent, not 56.3 percent.

All of this makes our electorate appear to be worse slackers than we actually are.

Not everyone, however, agrees.

Curtis Gans, for example, flatly denies that new election laws have anything to do with declining turnout.

But that's partly because he says elections officials are figuring turnout all wrong.

Gans, director of the Committee for Study of the American Electorate, says turnout should be based on all eligible voters rather than just those who are registered.

After all, we want everyone to vote, right?

"They always look at it as a gauge of their performance," Gans says of elections officials, "and that's crazy."

Gans agrees that registrars shouldn't have to carry so much "dead wood" on their rolls. But he says motor-voter registration and other outreach programs can only help get more people out to vote -- driving up the true turnout.

Still, Gans admits, even his figures have been on a 36-year decline, with the exception of 1992. This year, he estimates 48.8 percent of all eligible in the country cast a ballot. That's down from 55.2 percent in 1992 and 62.8 percent in 1960.

He estimates Nevada's turnout of all eligible voters at 39 percent, down from 50 percent in 1992.

"But," he says, "it has nothing to do with election laws, which have been made easier."

Gans subscribes to the increasingly popular theory that voter apathy has more to do with politics itself.

"It's the way we conduct our campaigns," he says. "It's the way we educate our children. It's our parties, our values, television itself, the national debt.

"Attack advertising is a major part of it. They go on one or two hours a day saying this candidate's bad, that candidate's worse.

"People get the message that all candidates are bad and eventually they don't vote."

Sound familiar?