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QuickTake:
Turnout in Lane County in the May 20 election has reached 21%. That’s better than the state average, but still means 4 out of every 5 voters in Lane County — and throughout Oregon — didn’t return a ballot in this election.
Here’s the good news, more or less, about Lane County turnout in the May 20 election: At 21% as of Friday, it’s about even with the statewide turnout.
But that still means that nearly 4 in every 5 voters — both in Lane County and throughout Oregon — didn’t return a ballot in this election.
That’s not a surprise to election watchers. These elections in odd-numbered years — with ballots filled with intensely local measures such as school board elections or government funding requests — almost never attract the kind of turnout that comes in elections featuring high-profile national or statewide races. (Those elections usually take place in even-numbered years.)
Still, even if you look only at elections in odd-numbered years, the 21% turnout in the May 20 election is the lowest in Lane County in 15 years.
“Turnout is different depending on the election and who’s on the ballot,” said Chandler James, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. Presidential elections usually attract the highest voter turnout, he noted.
“It’s not just that people automatically come out to vote, right?” James said. “They come out for a reason — more often than not because they’ve been asked to come out to vote by candidates.”
Presidential campaigns, for example, spend billions of dollars essentially telling voters to come out and vote — whether it’s through nationally televised rallies or ads that might be shown a half-dozen times during a broadcast of an Oregon-Washington football game.
Candidates for seats on school boards typically do not have the resources to buy television ads.
That ties into another reason why voters might be less inclined to vote in a local election: It can be harder for voters to gather information about local issues or candidates.
Information is available, of course, through local news outlets, the county voters’ pamphlet and other sources such as the League of Women Voters’ Vote411.org website. “But if you’re not interested in really digging in, it just might not be that motivating for you to vote,” James said.
He added that voters sometimes have a hard time getting enthused about elections in which many candidates are unopposed — and that’s a more frequent occurrence in off-year campaigns.
The paradox, James said, is that these local elections often have more impact on voters’ daily lives and pocketbooks than a national or even a statewide race.
And they’re also races in which just a handful of votes can determine a winner.
“Your vote matters a great deal, magnitudes more, in these close elections,” he said. “But the way that it’s perceived — because of marketing, basically — is that voting matters more in presidential elections because there’s more conversation about it, more controversy about it.”
James said these low-turnout elections reveal “a design flaw of the American system” in that they tend to give an advantage to well-known candidates — often, incumbents — who are able to mobilize blocs of voters. “It kind of favors the establishment,” he said. “All you really need to do is get a highly motivated group of people to vote (while) everybody else is staying home.”
He suggested that one answer might be to schedule fewer elections, with more races on the ballot.
“If we want the voters’ input on a particular candidate or a policy, the ideal thing would be to put them in the best position to make an informed decision about that,” he said. “I’m not saying it would solve all our problems to have a national voter day and have fewer elections. … But it would help.”
