Like Alice going down the rabbit hole, voters aren’t quite sure what to expect toward the bottom of the ballot each election cycle. For many, there’s as much a chance of finding a hookah-smoking caterpillar down there as there is a candidate for a local judgeship or a thickly-worded constitutional amendment, Jeremy Alford writes.
Maybe that’s why a growing number of voters tend to give up after they cast their decisions for the high-profile races, like governor. Generally speaking, the further down the ballot you go, the fewer votes there are in most races. That must be a depressing trend for the hundreds of people running for the various seats that make up the bottom of our fall ballot, from the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to your local parish council, to name just a few, Alford writes in his latest column.
Four years ago, when Gov. Bobby Jindal was re-elected, the governor’s race received 1 million votes. Given that the state had 2.8 million registered voters at the time, these folks should be commended. You can go further down this particular rabbit hole if you just consider that there are 4.6 million people living in Louisiana, of which 76% are eligible to vote, minus the incarcerated and others barred from signing up — still far more than are actually registered.
“Our politicians today are elected by only a small sliver of Louisiana’s residents and usually by a fraction of those who bother to register,” Alford notes. “This becomes even more vexing when you couple it with the fact that many residents who do vote refuse to participate in the entire ballot.”
While the numbers fluctuate from one race to the next, there’s no way to know why 132,000 fewer votes were cast for secretary of state, which in part is charged with increasing voter turnout, than for governor four years ago. “The voter drop-off is truly telling when you review the five constitutional amendments from that year,” Alford writes. “There were 966,000 votes cast on the first amendment and 875,000 on the last. Moreover, beginning with the first amendment, the total number of votes actually decreased, without exception, with each subsequent amendment.”
Alford writes that one can almost envision voters “pushing buttons for the first few amendments or races and then unceremoniously throwing up their hands, pulling back the curtain and pretending their democratic duty had been carried out.” If that many people are simply giving up before reaching the end of the ballot, he wonders, it would be interesting to know how many others are just pushing buttons at random, like a child trying to get the Millennium Falcon off the ground.
