California's voter turnout in last week's midterm elections ranked a dismal 47th in the nation, thanks to what observers called "a perfect storm" of uninspiring candidates, nonstop political attacks and disenchanted voters.
"Absolutely everything was in place for a record low-turnout election," said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll.
A new survey shows that high-profile, competitive political contests bring voters out to the polls. Minnesota and South Dakota, the states with the highest turnouts, featured close Senate races with national importance. More than 61 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots in Minnesota and South Dakota.
In California, polls taken just days before the election showed an unprecedented number of voters unwilling to choose either Democrat Gray Davis or Republican Bill Simon as the state's next governor. In the end, only about 30 percent of the state's 21.7 million eligible voters even bothered to go to the polls.
While the 271,000 absentee votes still being counted across the state will bump that up slightly, it's still California's worst turnout ever for a statewide general election.
"It's a great disappointment for me," said Secretary of State Bill Jones, who has worked for the past eight years to increase voter participation.
But all the "remember to vote" billboards, shopping bag reminders and good government civic lessons can't interest voters discouraged by millions of dollars of television attack ads or convinced that their vote won't make a difference.
"Would you buy a ticket to a World Series game if you knew who was going to win?" Jones asked. "We're the referees on the field, but it's the teams that bring the crowd."
California's voting numbers look even worse on a national level. Turnout across the nation actually was up slightly when compared with the 1998 midterm election, according to a survey done by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington.
Florida, where Jeb Bush, the president's brother, was running for re- election, was the only state to set a high turnout record, while California was one of six states to hit all-time lows.
The eight percentage point drop California experienced from the 1998 midterm election was the nation's biggest turnout dip. On the other end of the scale, Tennessee, with important races for governor and senator, saw its turnout jump by 15 percentage points.
But competition isn't everything, said Curtis Gann, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Even states with tight and expensive races, such as Colorado, Arizona and South Carolina, saw their turnout numbers fall.
The campaigns in many of those states, as in California, featured a flood of attack ads.
"There's no question that negative advertising undermines people's will to vote" Gann said. "They don't just drive turnout down, they denigrate the entire political system."
In California, where a large chunk of the nearly $100 million spent in the governor's race went toward attack advertising, the effect was devastating, Jones said.
"When you look at the sheer volume spent over a long period of time, it's very discouraging to the average voter," he said.
That's one of the reasons that 17 percent of California voters and 27 percent of Latinos surveyed in a Field Poll were undecided even on the eve of the Nov. 5 election. Many of them voted with their feet and walked right past their polling places, DiCamillo said.
"Negative ads work by turning voters against a candidate, but they also can turn voters off," he said.
There are plenty of other factors contributing to the national decline in voter turnout, which is more than 20 percent lower than it was in the 1960s, said Gann. Increasing distrust of public officials, decreased television coverage of politics, a decline in the quality of education and the growth of single-issue politics all play a role.
"There's no quick fix," Gann said. "It's going to take a generation to turn this around."
In California, political experts will be happy enough if voter participation just doesn't get worse.
"Hopefully, this will hold as the record for some years," DiCamillo said. "I think this was an aberration, an extraordinary low turnout with factors that won't come together again soon."
Dwindling turnout
The chart lists the states (and District of Columbia) with the five best and five worst turnouts in the Nov. 5 general election. The percentage reflects the voting age population -- those eligible to vote not just registered.
Source: Committee for the Study of the American Electorate
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