"The United Nations has said that at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful" in Afghanistan (Steven R. Weisman/NYT, "U.S. Hints of a Delay on Afghan Elections, Monday, February 16, 2004, <http://www.iht.com/articles/129665.html>).
By the standard that the United Nations sets for Afghanistan (!), fewer than half of the election years -- in 1966, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 -- in the United States have been "successful" since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:
***** Table A- 1. Reported Voting and Registration by Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex and Age Groups: November 1964 to 2000 Source: U. S. Census Bureau Internet Release date: February 27, 2002 Last Revised: June 3, 2002 (Numbers in thousands)
Total percent
Total Voting-Age Total Citizen
Year PopulationRegistered
2000 202,609 63.9 69.5 1998 198,228 62.1 67.1 1996 193,651 65.9 71.0 1994 190,267 62.5 67.1 1992 185,684 68.2 75.2 1990 182,118 62.2 68.2 1988 178,098 66.6 72.1 1986 173,890 64.3 69.0 1984 169,963 68.3 73.9 1982 165,483 64.1 68.5 1980 157,085 66.9 72.3 1978 151,646 62.6 66.7 1976 146,548 66.7 NA 1974 141,299 62.2 NA 1972 136,203 72.3 NA 1970 120,701 68.1 NA 1968 116,535 74.3 NA 1966 112,800 70.3 NA
<http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/tabA-1.pdf> *****
Even if we disregard Bush's theft of presidency, the 2000 elections were "unsuccessful" ones by the UN standard. :->
Ever since the Civil War abolished chattel slavery, the American electoral system has been redesigned to prevent electoral participation of the working-class majority.
***** CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF DEMOCRACY, UC IRVINE RESEARCH PAPERS
Turnout Decline in the U.S. and other Advanced Industrial Democracies Martin P. Wattenberg University of California, Irvine Copyright 1998, Martin Wattenberg
. . . In 1996, the turnout of just 49 percent of the voting age population (VAP) marked the first time that participation in a presidential contest had fallen below the 50 percent mark since the early 1920s -- when women had just received the franchise and not yet begun to use it very frequently (see Merriam and Gosnell, 1924). In 1997, not a single one of the eleven states that called its citizens to the polls managed to get a majority to vote. . . . The worst turnout of 1997 was a shockingly low 5 percent for a special election in Texas. This occurred even though Governor Bush stumped the state for a week, urging people to participate and promising that a "Yes" vote would result in a major tax cut. . . .
The Cost of Voting
More attention has been given in the literature to the costs than the benefits of voting. This is probably because one cost of voting in the United States has drawn overwhelming attention -- that of registration. The governments of most established democracies take the responsibility for registering as many eligible voters as possible. In the U.S., by contrast, the responsibility for registration lies solely with the individual. To make matters worse, some state registration laws in the past clearly sought to restrict rather than facilitate voter turnout. This was the case in the South, with its well-known provisions to prevent African-Americans from voting, but also in much of the North -- where the potential political power of immigrants threatened the early 20th century political establishment (Piven and Cloward, 1988). Some of these obstacles, such as the poll tax or literacy tests, were transparent attempts to keep particular types of people from registering; others, such as requiring citizens to appear at a county courthouse that was open just several hours a week, were not user-friendly for anyone.
G. Bingham Powell's (1986) comparative analysis estimated that America's unique registration laws accounted for roughly half the difference between U.S. turnout rates and those of other advanced industrialized democracies in the 1960s and 1970s. Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone (1980) examined variation in 1972 state registration laws on 3 crucial dimensions: closing date, office hours for registration, and laws for absentee registration. They found that if the most liberal registration laws had been in effect throughout the country, turnout would have been 9 percent greater. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980: 88) go on to "confidently" infer that if America adopted European-style registration then voter turnout would increase by substantially greater than this estimate.
A quarter of a century after this classic analysis, aggregate data continue to show that state registration laws are related to turnout at any single point in time. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980: 72-73) noted that their 1972 data did not allow them to assess the impact of the most liberal of all registration laws - election day registration. Since 1972, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho, Maine, and New Hampshire have adopted this procedure. In addition, North Dakota has no formal registration at all, having abolished it in 1951.1 Each of these 7 states ranked among the top 15 in terms of turnout of its voting age population in 1996, as demonstrated by Table 2. The importance of their registration procedures is further illustrated by data from the two election-day registration states that report when people registered. In Minnesota, 15 percent of the state's voters registered on election day, and in Idaho the figure was 13 percent. Therefore, without the voters who registered at the polls, these states would have had just slightly better than average turnout rates.2 . . .
. . . [T]he information costs that Americans typically encounter as they decide whether or not to vote are often overwhelming. As I look at what I am being asked to vote on in California this year, I find that even as a Political Science professor my level of political information is inadequate to deal with the many questions at stake. For example, I have voted for state Controller in four elections but I have yet to learn what the holder of this office actually does. When I ask my university students, the answer I always get back is, "He (or she) controls." Usually, I can prod someone into saying that the Controller deals with money. But students are stumped when I ask how this position differs from state Treasurer, which is also an elected office. I then pose further rhetorical questions, such as what are the issues in the campaigns for state Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Schools, or Secretary of State, and whether they know anything about the judges we have to decide whether to retain. Finally, I read off a few obscure California propositions, such as a 1994 vote on whether to abolish justice courts. By the time I am done, I think I have made my point: All these demands on citizens probably discourages many people from voting in the first place.
["Of course, just simplifying the electoral process itself would be one way to increase turnout in America. In 1930, Harold Gosnell wrote in _Why Europe Votes_ that one of the reasons for America's low turnout is because they are 'given an impossible task to perform on election day' (quoted in Lijphart, 1997: 8). As Dalton (1996: 46-47) has recently written, residents of Cambridge, England were asked to make 4 choices at the polls between 1985 and 1990 whereas the citizens of Irvine, California were called upon to cast 44 votes in 1992 alone."]
Unlike America's unique registration system, there is one other established democracy in which voters are faced with similarly high information costs. This country is Switzerland, and the similarities it shares with the United States in this respect may well account for the low turnout rates in each. First, the Swiss and American electoral systems are unusual among the established democracies in that they call upon their citizens to vote for offices too numerous to list here. Second, Switzerland, like many American states, regularly employs referenda to decide specific policy issues that are left to the parties to work out in most other countries (Steinberg, 1996; Kobach, 1994). Third, Switzerland's Federal Council is a unique executive branch that involves a form of permanent power sharing between the parties -- a system that is functionally equivalent to divided party government in the United States.
All of these features add up to elections being far more complex in the United States and Switzerland than in other established democracies. Political power is very decentralized, thereby making it extremely difficult for people to assess responsibility for governmental performance. At the same time, their citizens are called upon to make many decisions at the polling booth. In short, an examination of the American and Swiss cases leads to the following basic proposition about turnout: Build a user friendly electoral system and voters will come; build an overly complex system and they will stay away. Reforms like the recent Motor Voter Act may have made it easier to register, but voter turnout remains low because the key problem is the high information costs posed by America's non-user-friendly political system.
A final important cost that must be considered is the time it takes to get to the polls and go through the physical process of voting. As shown in Table 3, the most frequent response given by non-voters in the 1996 Census Bureau survey was that they could not take time off from work or school that day. The fact that elections are traditionally held in the United States on Tuesday is another reason why the American voting process is not user-friendly. ["An 1872 law established the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November as election day. . . . Americans have become quite accustomed to Tuesday elections, just as they have to other outdated practices such as the non-metric system for weights and measures. State after state continues to set primary election dates on Tuesdays -- all decisions which have been made in the 20th century, and some of which have been quite recent. In fact, 46 out of the 50 states held their 1996 primaries on Tuesday.8"] It is true that people who know they are going to be busy all day can usually vote ahead of time. Yet, many people can not predict how much free time they will have on a given Tuesday. Were elections to be held on the weekend, as in 70 percent of established democracies, people would at least have more free time that day to allow for voting. Indeed, Mark Franklin's (1996) comparative analysis demonstrates that countries which vote on a weekend or holiday have 6 percent higher turnout than would otherwise be expected. . . .
<http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/democ//papers/marty.html> ******
The Democratic Party would rather lose to the Republican Party than enable working-class electoral participation. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
