Headline: 5 Myths About Turning Out The Vote
Byline: Michael McDonald
If you're an upstanding
1. Thanks to increasing voter apathy,
turnout keeps dwindling.
This is the mother of all turnout myths. There may be plenty of apathetic
voters out there, but the idea that ever fewer Americans are showing up at the
polls should be put to rest. What's really happening is that the number of
people not eligible to vote is rising -- making it seem as though
turnout is dropping.
Those who bemoan a decline in American civic society point to the drop in
turnout from 55.2 percent in 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to
vote, to the low point of 48.9 percent in 1996. But that's looking at the total
voting-age population, which includes lots of people who aren't eligible to vote
-- namely, noncitizens and convicted felons. These
ineligible populations have increased dramatically over the past three decades,
from about 2 percent of the voting-age population in 1972 to 10 percent today.
When you take them out of the equation, the post-1972 "decline"
vanishes. Turnout rates among those eligible to vote have averaged 55.3 percent
in presidential elections and 39.4 percent in midterm elections for the past
three decades. There has been variation, of course, with turnout as low as 51.7
percent in 1996 and rebounding to 60.3 percent by 2004. Turnout in the most
recent election, in fact, is on a par with the low-60 percent turnout rates of
the 1950s and '60s.
2 Other countries' higher turnout
indicates more vibrant democracies.
You can't compare apples and oranges. Voting rules differ from nation to
nation, producing different turnout rates. Some countries have mandatory
voting. If Americans were fined $100 for playing voter hooky on Election Day,
Moreover, most countries have national elections maybe once every five
years; the
Americans are asked to vote more often -- in national, state, local and
primary contests -- than the citizens of any other country. They can be forgiven
for missing one or two elections, can't they? Even then, over the course of
several elections, Americans have more chances to participate and their turnout
may be higher than that in countries where people vote only once every five
years.
3 Negative ads turn off voters and
reduce turnout.
Don't be so sure. The case on this one is still open. Negative TV
advertising increased in the mid-1980s, but turnout hasn't gone down
correspondingly. The negative Swift boat campaign against Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Mass.) apparently did little to depress turnout in the 2004 presidential
race.
Some academic studies have found that negative advertising increases
turnout. And that's not so surprising: A particularly nasty ad grabs people's
attention and gets them talking. People participate when they're interested. A
recent GOP attack ad on Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.),
a Senate candidate, has changed the dynamic of the race, probably not because
it changed minds or dissuaded Democrats, but because it energized listless
Republicans.
We'll have to wait to see whether the attack on Ford backfires because
voters perceive it as unfair. That's the danger of going negative. So campaigns
tend to stick to "contrast ads," in which candidates contrast their
records with those of their opponents. When people see stark differences
between candidates, they're more likely to vote.
4 The Republican "72-hour
campaign" will win the election.
Not necessarily. You can lead citizens to the ballot, but you can't make
them vote.
Republicans supposedly have a super-sophisticated last-minute
get-out-the-vote effort that identifies voters who'll be pivotal in electing
their candidates. Studies of a campaign's personal contact with voters through
phone calls, door-to-door solicitation and the like find that it does have some
positive effect on turnout. But people vote for many reasons other than meeting
a campaign worker, such as the issues, the closeness of the election and the
candidates' likeability. Further, these studies focus on get-out-the-vote
drives in low-turnout elections, when contacts from other campaigns and outside
groups are minimal. We don't know what the effects of mobilization drives are
in highly competitive races in which people are bombarded by media stories,
television ads and direct mail.
Republican get-out-the-vote efforts could make a difference in close
elections if Democrats simply sat on the sidelines. But this year Democrats
have vowed to match the GOP mobilization voter for voter. So it'll take more
than just knowing whether a prospective voter owns a Volvo or a BMW for
Republicans to eke out victory in a competitive race.
5 Making voter registration easier
would dramatically increase turnout.
Well, yes and no.
In 1993, the Democratic government in
But while many people registered to vote, turnout didn't go up much.
Subsequent studies found only small increases in turnout attributable to Motor
Voter, perhaps 2 percentage points.
Sizable increases in turnout can be seen in states with Election Day registration, which allows people to register when they vote. This may be related to the fact that lots of people don't make up their minds to vote until Election Day, rather than months in advance when they get a license.
Questions: Do you agree with Michael Mcdonald that
voting turnout is not a problem in