Apathy

Apathy — such a common word when it comes to voters. In Hawaii, one-party dominance feeds the malaise but initiatives such as online voter application and same-day registration hope to move the participation needle

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Getting people engaged enough in the political process so they participate by voting is the elusive goal of every good-government organization, in any state. In Hawaii, voter turnout has been frustratingly low. Even with a primary election with several compelling races, only 42.3 percent of the state’s 687,500 registered voters decided to cast a ballot by election day.

"People thought the mayor’s race would kick things up, but it didn’t make much difference," said Neal Milner, political analyst and retired University of Hawaii professor.

Hawaii’s turnout rate is on the low end, by most reckonings. One problem may be that voters have to be registered 30 days in advance of an election when many of them aren’t particularly interested in the political intrigue until the final week or two. Most observers believe making voter registration easier, even on the same day as the election, would provide a significant boost, but there are other factors suppressing it that would take far more work to change.

For starters, said Milner, the fact that most Hawaii political races are fairly uncompetitive and dominated by one party siphons off much of the excitement and the voters’ sense that they really can make a difference.

"When you look at voter turnout over time, it starts to drop about the time when the Republican Party practically disappears from the scene," he said — and ending single-party rule is no easy task.

"Nobody really knows why turnout is low in Hawaii," Milner added. "We know general factors that seem to affect turnout, but nobody has looked to see if those factors apply here."

For example, he said, nonvoters nationally tend to be lower on the educational and income scales, and younger, too — people tend to engage when they start paying taxes or otherwise having a stake in decisions.

National elections expert Michael McDonald agreed that there simply is no hard data on why people don’t vote in a given place or year. A professor at George Mason University, McDonald keeps state-by state election figures on his website (elections.gmu.edu). The most recent data available for all states is from the general election of 2010.

Where Hawaii tends to describe turnout as the percentage of registered voters, McDonald prefers to base comparisons on the percentage of the "voting-eligible population" (VEP). That’s the number of adults 18 and older, minus those who are ineligible due to non-U.S. citizenship and other disqualifiers.

The Hawaii VEP percentage in 2010 was 39.8 percent, 14th from the bottom. It was not the worst but certainly not very good. And this state finished last in 2008. With Hawaii-born Barack Obama on the ballot, only 48.8 percent in his native state showed up at the polls.

McDonald sees two separate issues in voter turnout. One relates to primary elections, which always lag in voter interest and have been generally on a downward track since primaries were introduced a century ago. One reason: They tend to be seen as partisan selections rather than a more distinct choice between political approaches.

"People are turned off to party politics," he said. "One of the ways it manifests is we see fewer registering with political parties. They don’t feel connected to these parties, they don’t feel ownership of these parties, they don’t feel their vote is meaningful."

But overall, voter turnout has been on the upswing in recent years, McDonald said, partly because parties have invested heavily in voter mobilization, and because voter registration restrictions have been rolled back in some areas. The state with the highest voter turnout, he said, is Minnesota, where it’s possible to register on the same day that you vote. Election-day registration (EDR) in that state survived a federal court challenge on Aug. 17.

Hawaii is taking steps in that direction, said state Sen. Les Ihara, one of those who supported the enactment of an electronic voter registration provision. The new law authorizes the acceptance of electronic applications to register to vote, beginning with the primary election of 2016. County clerks indicated they needed the intervening years to get the system up and running, Ihara said, and the law included an appropriation of $500,000 to design the online voting system.

Having an electronic database would essentially provide the groundwork for election-day registration here, as well, he added. The drive for EDR locally goes back a few years. Advocates in 2011 tapped Demos, a national policy and research organization, to estimate the effect EDR could have on voter turnout in Hawaii.

R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, who authored the study published in February 2011, projected that overall turnout could go up by 5.3 percent statewide if people are allowed to register on election day. The effect would be greatest on young voters, ages 18-25; a 9.2 percent bump in turnout was predicted in that population. And those who have moved in the six months preceding the election were likely to show a 7.3 percent increase, according to the report.

Oregon is on the forefront of another voter participation initiative, in 1998 becoming the first state to conduct its elections entirely by mail. Last year, Washington state followed suit, with the passage of a law requiring all counties to move to vote-by-mail elections.

The effect on Oregon’s turnout has been positive, but vote-by-mail hasn’t been proved to be a panacea. Oregon turnout hasn’t topped McDonald’s list in recent cycles, but the percentages — 67.7 in 2008, 52.7 in 2010 — are impressive.

"Oregon has found that in lower-interest elections, they do have an increase in turnout," he said. "You actually have a reminder to vote in your hand, and there’s this pressure people feel to vote."

In addition, he said, campaigns know precisely when ballots go out and do outreach to urge voters to send them in.

McDonald’s research on get-out-the-vote efforts across the country turned up a Hawaii legislative standing committee report from 1993, indicating that a proposal to enable voter registration at birth had been floated that year.

The state Legislative Reference Bureau was unable to confirm the bill, but veterans of the League of Women Voters of Hawaii remembered the idea being discussed internally.

Beppie Shapiro, now the president of the organization, said it’s still considered a current proposal among the members of the national organization. There are competing theories about the causes and cures for voter indifference, she said, but one that she cited was the tendency to recoil from partisan rancor. All the negative campaigning in this politically fractious country, Shapiro said, has turned some people off voting.

Milner acknowledged that many voters do feel such an aversion. But he said he suspects that often busy citizens simply have too many other worries to invest the time needed to make all the choices a ballot serves up to them. Overcoming that information gap is possible through community meetings and forums, he said, but that’s a labor-intensive remedy.

"There is cynicism, of course, but cynicism often requires a connection to the political process," Milner said. "Just as much of it is that people have busy days and busy lives and, for better or worse, politics at some level just doesn’t become part of it."