Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer
Nov. 25, 1997
[A version of this commentary was published as How the other half lives without voting in the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 25, 1997]
When Henry Montoya walked into his neighborhood polling place in west Denver earlier this month, as he has for the past 10 years, he signed in to record that he was voting, went behind the curtain and pushed the exit button at the bottom, having deliberately voted for no one.
Montoya is unusual, but in him lie two distinct political species: Americans who vote and those who don't. Those who don't outnumber those who do. In presidential elections, it's a close call, with 51% of the voting-age population - about 100 million people - not voting in Nov. 1996. In off-year elections, such as the Nov. 11 election, it's not even close.
Only 13.5%of registered voters turned out for the school and municipal elections in the six counties in and around Chicago.
In New York City, where Rudy Giuliani won re-election for mayor, The New York Times reported that turnout was "among the lowest for any mayoral election in recent decades, with 38 percent of the registered voters casting ballots." That's registered voters. If the newspaper had used voting-age population to reflect not only those who didn't vote but those who weren't even registered, the figure would have been well under 30%.
In New Jersey, where Christine Todd Whitman was narrowly re-elected governor in one of the nation's most hotly contested races, The Record in Bergen County reported that 54% of registered voters cast ballots, far lower than the 65% who turned out in 1993.
In Maine, the Portland Press Herald reported the highest turnout in a "post presidential year in Maine in at least a quarter of a century." Yet, it was only 37% of the state's voting-age population.
In Colorado, where Montoya cast his symbolic ballot, The Denver Post reported that turnout in the city was 20% among registered voters.
The message is the same state by state and election by election. Non-voting is a chronic phenomenon in the United States. The hardened core of non-voters are not turned off by a particular candidate or a certain election. They opted out long ago and generally are beyond the reach of conventional measures to bring them back.
They may tell pollsters they don't vote because they don't like the choice of candidates. What they mean, we have found, is they don't connect and aren 't likely to connect enough with any political candidate or party or with the electoral process to be involved.
When Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism surveyed 1,000 likely non-voters before the 1996 presidential election, we found that they are more likely than voters to call themselves independent. What they mean is they've become independent of the body politic. The disconnect was enormous; the conviction to snub the polling place ingrained.
Non-voters tended to be younger, less educated, poorer and less likely than voters to discuss politics or public affairs with either family or friends. Beyond that, non-voters presented much like voters and spanned the spectrum of American society.
We identified five types of non-voters: Doers, Unpluggeds, Irritables, Don't Knows and Alienateds. To go beneath the survev data. we interviewed 30 in depth. Doers tend to be educated, financially secure, active and selectively involved news consumers. On person, who has voted twice in his life, is offended by people who blithely vote for the lesser of two evils. A woman, who 's in the thick of Savannah's thriving tourism and convention industry, feels she doesn't know enough about candidates. A third is content to let those interested in politics carry the load while he exercises his right to pursue ordinary happiness.
Unpluggeds tend not to have much formal education and don't interact much with the politcal process. To the extent they have an interest in politics, it has has been the heightened dramas of President Kennedy's assassination and Watergate. On woman tends bar and ignores discussions of politics, another tends to her nephew, her job, bowling and movies, and a third tends to leave her mobile home mostly to sit at the pub across the road. Politics never enters the picture. They feel politicians don't tend to them and they return the sentiment in kind.
Irritables are inclined to believe their vote doesn't matter no matter who' running. On woman we got to know sees them all as hollow faces on parade, and wishes she could be a fly on the government wall to see what they really do with their days.
Don 't Knows know they don't know. One man watches television news every night and realizes he doesn't know a Democrat from a Republican, a liberal from a conservative, or what Congress or his local government officials do. One woman didn't know until the last minute that Hillary Clinton was coming to her son's school, and when she saw it with her own eyes, she just got mad.
Alienateds are possibly the hardest core of non-voters. They've lost faith in the system, and no quick fixes are likely to move them. Though her father voted and was a lifelong Democrat, one woman has never voted, never registered to vote, and "never will be."
The mistake we've made every election, as we did again in the aftermath of last Tuesday's off-year election, is to treat voter turnout as part of the political campaign awaiting the evening's returns.
Let 's face it, the results are in, and for at least a generation to come. a vast core of America shows no signs of opting in. Worse yet is that the political process - its candidates, parties and pollsters - and the media are unlikely to do anything about it. Their investment is tied more to the stuff of elections than to the disaffection beyond the vote.
Which brings us back to Henry Montoya. One Election Day years ago, he walked into the booth, closed the curtain and looked at the list of candidates. "None of this is of value to me or anyone else," he recalls thinking. He pulled the lever on a blank ballot and walked out.
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