|
PANEL II, SESSION B: CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS
BRUCE CAIN, Director, Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley
R. WILLIAM HAUCK, President, California Business Roundtable
MARK BALDASSARE, Research Director, Public Policy Institute of California
Moderated by DAVID BRODER, Columnist, The Washington Post
Border: Who votes in California, who doesn't vote? What are the trends in that voting?
Baldassare: The short answer is fewer people are voting in California. A survey we conducted the week before the election in November gives a sense of how people are feeling about the process in California and why it is that so many people aren't voting, and maybe some things that we can do about that. We interviewed over 10,000 Californians over the course of the last election. This is the result of a survey that Bruce Cain and I, our two organizations were involved with, the Institute for Governmental Studies at Berkeley and the Public Policy Institute of California with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
This last election set a record both in the primary and general election for the lowest voter turnout in California history. In the general election we also set a record in the governor's race for the most money spent - over $100 million. Over the course of the campaign, we saw very little change in voter opinion about the two candidates, despite the money raised. Voters told us - which is very different from the way politicians and political consultants handle elections - that, for them, winning isn't everything. They want to know about how the candidates stand on issues. That's what most voters told us. That's not necessarily what the voters got out of this last election.
Most voters were less enthusiastic about voting last year than they had been in previous elections - six out of ten voters across party lines told us that. Typically, as you get closer to the elections, more people know who they are going to vote for. In this last election people were as undecided as they were at the end as they were at the beginning. Voters weren't satisfied with the choice of candidates in this election, especially people who went to the polls. Only about one in three said that they were satisfied with the choices that were presented to them. Is there any wonder why people aren't voting in elections?
People saw many, many ads - that's what most of that $100,000,000 was spent on in this governor's race. By the end of the election, eight in ten likely voters had seen ads. Most people told us that the ads weren't helpful in deciding who to vote for. Three out of ten independents said that they felt that those ads were helpful, but most said they were not. Two out of three in our last survey said they felt that the candidates didn't discuss the issues in a way that was satisfactory to them. They felt campaigns that dwell on the negative are not what they are looking for, even though that's increasingly what they're getting. Six out of ten voters said they felt the campaign was too negative. Most felt that in the past ten years, in terms of ethics and values, the campaigns were getting worse. Nearly half said that campaigns had been worse than they were ten years.
Voters - what they want out of elections is very different from what they are getting today. Most voters said debates, call-in shows, speeches, town hall meetings were what they were most looking for. A chance again to learn about the issues, to understand, a chance for the candidates to tell them how they felt they were going to deal with issues most important to them. Most voters told us they had in mind specific issues they wanted to hear about. How the candidate communicates the message has an important impact on how they view those candidates. When candidates speak to voters through debates, they feel more favorably towards the candidates than when they are using television ads. In this last campaign, we only had one debate in the governor's race, and that had an impact on how people viewed the candidates.
The system is now producing fewer voters in this last governor's race than 20 years ago, when we had ten million fewer Californians. That's rather shocking.
Six out of ten said that they favored an initiative which would require candidates to have debates. Candidates who signed a code of conduct pledging to run truthful, fair and clean campaigns they view more favorably. They felt that disclosure was important; candidates giving specifics to issues that matter to them was important. Californians have not recently been particularly generous in terms of public funding; on this issue even the candidates feel so strongly about the fact that campaigns are on the wrong track that they would support public funding for state campaigns. That may not be enough to actually win an initiative, but it tells you something about the level of dissatisfaction.
2002 was clearly a low point for California: unpopular candidates, uninspiring campaigns and a use of television ads which most Californians did not feel was what they were looking for in terms of learning about the issues and the candidates. It's not that voters are disengaged in the sense that they are not listening or watching; they are. They have views about what they think needs to be better done to have campaigns and elections which will make them inspired to participate in the future.
R. William Hauck: Talk about citizen participation: that's almost today, in my view, an oxymoron. What I want to do is try to suggest what I believe might be some courses of action, perhaps a solution to some of the issues. Recognizing that in a state like this, of 35 million people, whatever you say and whatever you do as an office holder, probably half the people will be sympathetic for what you are saying and half won't.
We need to start with a restoration of trust between our citizens and their government in order to win some reengagement of voters and citizens of this state to the political and governmental process. It's critical that you do that, because the politicians are going to shape the future equality of our state.
We need to restore the open primary election system in California in a manner deemed constitutional by the United States Supreme Court. Doing so would provide voters with many more choices in who will be elected to represent them. The current reapportionment districting plan in force in this state resulted last year in almost no competitive elections. In 2002 in 178 state legislative and congressional districts, there was one competitive congressional race, and that was the district of Gary Condit, who lost the primary election. There were perhaps two or three competitive races for state legislative seats for the Assembly and the Senate.
All races are decided in the primary election, where voter turnout is far lower even than in a general election. A very small minority of voters in each district is deciding who will represent all voters. Politicians recognize this, and they become very skilled at aiming their messages to the voters who they know will show up on election day and separately to the voters who will vote absentee. When the incumbent protection districting plan combined with California's very restrictive term-limit law enacted by the voters in 1990, the result was a legislature that contains an increasing number of ideological members on the Left and the Right. They're coming from other types of employment, and for many, service in the legislature is the best job they ever had or perhaps ever will have. This is not to denigrate public service. I've done my share of it and have benefited from doing so. But the totality of what I'm describing doesn't result in a legislature that has membership of diverse backgrounds. It may have resulted in membership of ethnic diversity but certainly not of total background and respect. With the six-year limit of the Assembly and noncompetitive districts, once elected in the first primary election, a person can focus on what next career step is possible for him or for her and start aiming at that. If you're focused on what you're going to do next, people trim their sails.
With respect to term limits, we need to modify the term-limit laws in this state rather than discard term-limit laws. I propose reducing the maximum number of years a person may serve from 14 to 12 but permit the service to be wherever the person chooses and can continue to be elected in the Assembly or Senate, or if they want to try to split their service, let them do so. This would assure regular turnover, which voters continue to strongly favor, but would bring back some sense of institutional amendment and continuity. California's problems are too complex to expect anyone to gain sufficient understanding in six months to a year and be able to make informed judgments about them.
We should consider implementing statewide voting by mail, at least on a pilot basis, to determine if it encourages greater participation. We should move the March primary election for all offices except president of the United States to early September. To have eight months between elections makes no sense to me nor, I believe, to voters. Doing so also might accomplish some real campaign finance reform, which we have not had in this state. While reducing the size of districts would have that effect, I don't think the people of California are prepared to increase the size of the California legislature in the way that would be required to reduce the size of the districts down to what is reasonable.
With two entirely separate elections, a great deal more money is raised and spent than would be true with a more compact process. The organization I represent supported a bill to do this last year which won bipartisan support and passed both houses by wide margins but was vetoed by the governor. We will support similar legislation this year. These steps, and undoubtedly others, are essential to restoring trust between the electorate and their representatives. There are no guarantees, but changes like this are worth the risks involved.
I am certain of one thing the status quo in this process is unacceptable. Californians have a long and rich connection to innovation and risk. They also have consistently demonstrated good judgment at the ballot box. We need to give them an opportunity to do so again; anything less, in my view, will not be sufficient.
Bruce Cain: There's a problem, but there's a tendency to overstate the problem. This is something political scientists do in a lot of different realms. It's never made us popular. In the area of campaign finance, it's made us extremely unpopular. But I will do it anyway, because there's a tendency to either downplay or to get hysterical about things, and I think we need to put it in perspective.
Take the issue of participation. There's no question there's been a decline in participatory activity over the last 30 years, but there are some easy explanations for what's going on, some of which are demographic and not political in nature. This trend is occurring when there are actually more opportunities to vote than ever. In all advanced democracies we're offering more opportunities for participation across the board. Opportunities for participation have particularly increased in European democracies that had far more limited opportunities than we have in the United States, but even in California, which has been participation crazy, we have expanded participation. We now elect the insurance commission, which is a great thrill that all of us have enjoyed a lot, I'm sure. We almost in Big Green elected a czar of the environment, but we had the good sense to pull back from that. You can go down the list. We elect a lot of offices at the local government level, all the special districts; we have elected judges. We have enormous opportunities to elect all the time.
But in the United States and in these foreign countries, there's a tendency for participation to be dropping as opportunities expand. What does that mean? Look at the raw numbers. (I'm going to use the percent of the registered who voted, not the citizens eligible, because those are pure estimates; we don't even know how many citizens there are in this country, we don't know how many undocumenteds there are in this country, but the registered voter files are reasonably good.) Seventy-eight percent of those registered participated in 1962. In 2002 you get 55 percent. That sounds pretty big. Then you notice a fateful decision made in 1972 to allow teen-agers to vote. Teen-agers don't vote at the same rate that older people vote, because they have more to do in their lives than we have as we get older. In California alone, in 1970, you basically had 76 percent of the registered voters participating. We passed the law in '72, we have an off-year election in '74 - non-presidential election - and it drops down to 64 percent. Drops ten points because of those damn teen-agers. The same guys that make all the noise and drive crazy are also driving down our participation rates around the country.
After that, it's pretty consistent - around 60 to 64 percent most elections. So what's the sort of political factor between an election that we care about and an election that we don't care about? About 5, 6 percent. There's another problem - immigration - which has brought in citizens that have linguistic barriers and have other kinds of socio-economic barriers, and that's also going to suppress the vote somewhat.
What's the best thing we could do to put the participation rate up? Change the voting age to 55. Simple as that. Now - actually it better be 54, because I'm 54. Only David would be voting here.
Who are these people who vote? Twenty-four percent of the population is in the 18- to 29-year-old category, 18 percent of the registered voters are in the 18 to 29 category and 13 percent of likely voters. Take David's generation, 60 and over. Nineteen percent are the percentage of adults in the population; of voters, they constitute practically a third. Older people dominate the electorate. People without kids dominate the electorate. People with kids constitute 40 percent of the population and only 29 percent of the electorate. White people in this state dominate the statewide electorate. Fifty-one percent of adults are non-Hispanic white, 73 percent of likely voters are non-Hispanic white.
So you get the picture: the electorate statewide in California is dominated by older, white, better-educated, higher socio-economic status. To some extent we counteract that through redistricting, because redistricting is done on the basis of population. Because poor people tend to live with poor people, and wealthy people tend to live with wealthy people, the districts that have the wealthy people in them have more voters in them than the districts that have the poor people in them. So even though we call it "one person, one vote," that's not, strictly speaking, what we have. We have equally populated districts but they aren't populated with equal numbers of voters, which was the intent of the court decision, but unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on how you look at it - the Constitution says you do both the apportionment and the redistricting on the basis of population.
To some extent the system has a kind of Madisonian logic to it the legislature over-represents poor people and minorities to some degree, and the statewide electorate in California over-represents wealthy, rich, white people. In that Madisonian logic, that plays itself up in the dynamic of Sacramento politics.
What are the causes? One - and I'd say about 5 or 6 percent of it - is political campaigns. You get a bad campaign, you get bad candidates, you get lots of negative ads, you get a totally over-controlled process by consultants, and they are a key problem in all of this, and it's going to cost about 5 percent of the votes. Most people did not like the last election, but most people who are registered to vote still went. We held our nose, we did our civic duty and voted. That's always been the case, that most of it is this sense of obligation, this sense of need to vote for the people that you want in office, to vote for the best of the worst, whatever it is that's given to you.
There are other factors - the possibility of burnout. How many elections can you go to when you have all these off-year elections? San Francisco's gearing up for a mayoral race next year. There are special elections we might have. We might have a recall election, oh God. We get to replay what we just did. There are local elections that are held in the off-year. There are special elections held when people resign, and one of the negative things about term limits is people simply leave office more frequently, and so you have more special elections. That means there's more voting. More voting may also produce something of a burnout factor.
But there's a fourth thing going on, and that is the civic culture. I think the civic culture shifted with my generation, the Vietnam generation. That sense of obligation and pride and civic responsibility did drop. The culture became more cynical. People will rally to vote, but they have to understand a reason to vote, and so you see turnout sort of vary somewhat given what the stakes of an election are. Combined with what's happening with campaigning, you have a tendency for turnout to drop. Is it necessarily bad that turnout is lower? The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.
There have been a lot of political science studies trying to figure out whether there's a systematic bias in policy-making as a result of all these biases that I talked about in terms of the turnout. The answer is, in general elections we can't find a lot of systematic bias, not too many elections would be decided differently, not too many policies would be either implemented or not implemented as a result of these biases. But there clearly are some situations in special elections where turnout biases can matter. One of them may well be this recall election. If we have this recall election, the name of the game is, Who's going to turn out in an off-year election, who's going to have the money to turn out their troops? That could be an election in which a difference is made. We have to be careful. There is a problem, but we're not actually, as many people in the rest of the country say, sliding into the ocean.
Border: The tone of what Bill Hauck said at the beginning was one of serious concern about what he described as a breakdown of trust between government and government officials and the public. Your statistics tend to carry the message, Well, it's changed, but it hasn't changed all that much. Do you think he is exaggerating the seriousness of the problem - or that the problem is perhaps not a problem at all?
Cain: I think it's a little bit exaggerated, and I think you have to do that when you're in the forum business. There's a whole scholarly literature on trust. Trust measures tend to be highly correlated with economic conditions. When economic conditions are good, we tend to trust people more, especially elected officials. When economic conditions are bad and conditions generally are bad, we tend to trust people less. But I do think that compared to 40 or 50 years ago (not that we had good data 50 years ago), there probably has been a decline in trust of representatives. We tend to trust our own representatives; we just don't trust the representative next door or in the other state. Trust has a lot of peculiar features to it; it's certainly something you want to try to restore, but it's maybe being exaggerated a bit.
Border: Mark, a number of the publications that have come out of your organization seem to me to suggest that at least some constituencies in this state - not particularly the four of us - feel a good deal of distance or alienation from government in California.
Baldassare: That's what the public's been telling us of late. We've talked to 70,000 Californians since '98 during some extraordinarily good times, during periods of real concern such as right after September 11 and more recently, when Californians feel that we're in bad economic times. Except for a small blip after September 11 (and I agree with Bruce that when it comes to approval ratings of officials, they tend to go up and down with the economy), Californians have been telling us that most feel they can't trust the federal or state government to do what's right just about always or most of the time. They feel that decisions that are being made either in Sacramento or in Washington are being made for special interests rather than for people like themselves. Those feelings are to some degree connected to economic and demographic conditions. But they're certainly at levels where it makes you wonder the degree to which people have the kind of trust that's needed when the state has to make difficult decisions as it does today about what to do about a $30-billion deficit. How do we respond when the government is telling you that we need to raise taxes or we need to cut government programs, and many people are just saying that they don't feel that they can trust their leaders in these circumstances?
Border: Bill Hauck, the specific changes that you were talking about suppose all of them were enacted. How different do you think the atmosphere in terms of trust and participation would be in this state?
Hauck: I don't know. That's the honest answer. But I believe very strongly that the status quo, particularly in Sacramento, is not acceptable. I am a person who is in Sacramento, on the scene, every working hour of every day, and I see tremendous inability to achieve consensus in the legislature even on time of day, much less on how to solve a $35-billion problem.
We can afford the risks that are involved in trying to systemically change what people in polls are saying the political system in California is broken and it needs attention. There's overwhelming support for returning to an open primary, because what the voters understand is that that would result in more choices. More choices, candidates appealing to more voters would result potentially in better people being elected to office.
Cain: On this issue of the open primary I disagree. We have done extensive research on the blanket primary. I have a book - if you're having trouble sleeping - at the University of California Press called Voting at the Political Fault Line. We studied the impact of having a blanket primary on turnout. The one year we had the primary, the turnout was 57.6 percent. In 1994 when we had the closed primary, the turnout was 60.5 percent. It didn't increase turnout, even among Independents. There may be reasons to have the open primary, but they have more to do with the agenda of saving the Republican Party. The original impetus of the blanket primary was that Republicans who pushed this were right, that Democrats and Independents are the best way to save the Republican Party. If you open up their primary so that Independents and moderate Democrats can cross over and vote on the Republican primary, the odds are that more moderate Republicans will get elected. That's the reason to have a blanket primary, to save the Republican Party from itself. It's not about increasing participation, it's not about decreasing or increasing costs, it's not about restoring trust, it's about helping the Republican Party save itself from its ideologues.
Hauck: My purpose in making the proposal is not to save the Republican Party. That wouldn't be a bad thing for California, but that's not my purpose. My purpose is to bring some balance back to the California Legislature. It's going more left and more right. We have people that are interested in being part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Baldassare: I have a chapter in Bruce's book. I don't get any royalties for it, but I will say that everything in it is true and correct.
The open primary was something voters voted for. In 1996 it was an initiative that voters supported. We don't have a lot of data points in terms long-term impact, because it wasn't around very long. Both party structures agreed they didn't want an open primary. So they brought it to the court and that's why we don't have a blanket primary. Voters were not happy that the court overturned it; they want an open primary today. It's something the voters believe in.
Border: Is the initiative process part of the problem or part of the solution to participation in this state?
Hauck: I spent a lot of time looking at the initiative process and trying to figure out how to improve it. The result of those efforts is, simply make no change in the initiative process of California. Voters and citizens of California recognize that their ability use the initiative in the way that it was originally intended is not there today. People who are supporting the recall of the governor who want to put this before the voters, they have to go out and get 900,000 signatures of registered voters. That probably means they could get about 1,200,000 or 1,300,000 signatures in order to qualify for the ballot. That's impossible on a volunteer basis. The only way really to do it is to pay for the signatures, so you're not likely to see this on the ballot unless somebody comes up with about $2 million to get it on the ballot. If someone does, then my guess is that it will be on the ballot.
Initiative over the years has certainly presented California with some challenges. Starting in 1978, with enactment of Proposition 13, it has demonstrated the inability of the Legislature to solve the kinds of problems that it should solve and make the initiative that was being voted on by voters unnecessary. It is part of the problem, but it is also not something that California voters are going to ever let go of.
Cain: Is the initiative process the voice of the people or not? There are two schools of thought on this. One is sitting to my left - David Border - who's written an excellent book on the initiative process. His basic view is the initiative process, which was once the voice of the people, meant to check special interests, has been co-opted by special interests as their mechanism for getting things that they can't get through the Legislature. The tables have been turned. A second school of thought says that's a little bit of an overstatement and says, "If you actually look at the success of special interests, they're not very good." The tobacco companies and the insurance companies are not very good at getting what they want passed by initiative, but they're pretty good at stopping things. Their power is more like a negative power rather than a positive power.
My own view is the agenda itself - that is, what gets onto the ballot - is very much an elite-driven process for all the reasons that Bill was pointing out, that it is no longer a volunteer process, but it is a professionalized process and it requires money. It's done by lawyers and initiative framers in secret rooms. There are not hearings. There's no chance to amend it - it's up or down on the ballot. It's a far less democratic process than what you have in the Legislature. All the norms of transparency and the rest that we have in the Legislature don't apply to the initiative process. In the end the people still do have the final say. Fortunately, most of the time people vote "no" on the popular initiative, which is the saving grace.
What can you do about it? Most of the things that you want to do, you can't do, because the court says, "No." Which is the same problem that you have in campaign finance. Say you want to control the amount of money that rich people spend on initiatives. The court says, "We can't do that because there's no quid pro quo corruption; you're simply spending the money to articulate your view. It's the same thing as a candidate expenditure or a personal expenditure." The court says that contribution limits or any kind of limits on campaign finance with the initiative are a no-go. So forget about that. Or you might say, "Well, let's get rid of the paid signature gatherers," which are professionalized in the process. The problem with that is the court says, "No. Right of association to use whatever you want - paid or unpaid."
Maybe constitutional initiatives should be a two-thirds vote rather than a majority. We had this odd situation in California where passing a budget requires a two-thirds vote, but you can pass an initiative that allocates money with less than a majority of the vote. It's just the plurality of whoever decides to show up at the polls on a given day. We have a two-thirds vote for the Legislature, we make it hard for them and we make it easy for us, so you get the opposite of the biases. Maybe some subject matter restrictions, maybe certain things shouldn't be on the ballot that deal with fiscal aspects of the state because it doesn't lead to a coherent whole. These are things that are possible. Bill Hauck's commission admirably tried to do testimony on this.
Baldassare: We've had a couple of excellent commissions on the process. Speaker Bob Hertzberg had a commission on initiatives. I want to quote one thing he said in his final report "Those who gave California voters this powerful tool for reform would have a hard time recognizing the initiative process as we know it today, where powerful interests clutter the ballot with contradictory proposals incapable of passing constitutional muster."
Many Californians share this view of the initiative process. But I think it's important to keep in mind that they have an "amend it, not end it" approach to the initiative process. When we asked people how they feel about initiatives, overwhelmingly people say it's a good thing. They think it's a good thing that the voters can change the constitution of the state with a majority vote. They feel that they have a better chance of making good laws and changing public policies in a positive way through the initiative process rather than through the legislative process. We can disagree whether or not that's in fact the case, but they hold this view why? Not because they feel that the initiative process is some perfect form of governance but because they hold the process of representatives making decisions in a much less favorable light.
Most Californians feel that the initiative process is controlled by special interests but the legislative process is even more controlled by special interests. They say there are too many ballot measures, they're confusing, they're put on there by special interests, but I want to be the one to sort it out - not my representatives.
The initiative process is here to stay. Eight in ten Californians favored increasing public disclosure to find out who's actually backing both the signature gathering as well as the campaigns themselves. Six out of ten said they would rather go to a process in which volunteers gathered signatures. That's not going to happen for reasons involving the court. But eight out of ten said they wanted a system of review and revision so when things did make it to the ballot, they were sure that there weren't going to be problems with language or legal problems later on.
The most serious issue with the initiative process gets back to the profile of voters in the electorate compared to the average residents of California today. An initiative process ought to be reflecting the will of the voters. If we had an electorate that is largely white, older homeowners and affluent, they may be making decisions that don't really represent the diverse population of the state. That is the biggest threat to the overuse of the initiative process.
Border: Voting through the Web - is this a resource for information about candidates that has not really yet been fully exploited?
Cain: The Web is a fascinating tool. It is becoming more important to political organizing. We've seen newspapers talking about the anti-war movement and the role the Internet plays. Candidates have struggled a little bit more in how to use the Web. John McCain was able to use it reasonably effectively to fundraise; we'll see more use of the Web in the future.
There was a time, prior to the clicker and cable TV and the Web, we had common information. I tell students this. They can't believe it. "There was a time when there were only three networks?" When the ads came on and your butt was stuck to the sofa, you didn't want to get up to change the station, so you listened to the ads, or you listened to the public service, or you listened to the speech. People had a harder time avoiding politics. Now there are the super-informed - those of us who spend way too much time looking at Web sites and reading information. Another class are downloading music from the Web and are not plugged in at all. Then you get to an issue like Iraq, where you actually have to know something - like, Did you know that the Iraqis weren't on those planes that went into the towers? Did you know that Saddam Hussein didn't actually fund that operation? Little facts like that… Polls indicate that large numbers of Americans don't get those facts right. Part of it is we have a segmentation of knowledge; with the technological development has come this kind of segmentation into the super-informed and the super-uninformed.
Border: Particularly, I was thinking about just simply voting on the Web.
Hauk: I would be real careful about moving to voting on the Web at this point, if we're going to remain a representative democracy.
Baldassare: The Web means something a lot different to people 18 to 24 - very heavily used, much more so than newspapers. I think it's worth exploring for that reason to get a younger electorate.
Audience Question: When you're talking about voter-turnout, you're saying our electorate is white, older and affluent. It's not a big deal that poor people don't vote. Look at other nations; you don't see this drop-off among young people and poor people. We have now single-digit voter turnout - the Dallas mayoral election. I think that the idea that you can find out how people would vote just by calling them on the phone is one of the great myths of our time.
Cain: Actually, it may be that we could bypass elections completely and just do it by polling, because these guys aren't off by very much. You don't really need everybody there to get a representative outcome. You just need a representative sample.
Audience Member: Let's just cancel elections.
Cain: It's a good thing that people vote and participate, it's important to get people to participate. It's disturbing that certain segments of society don't participate. The evidence of a policy bias is sporadic, but that doesn't mean it's still not an important problem. Voting in and of itself forces people to become informed and think about politics. It's an educative process. If people are not participating, then they're losing a certain incentive to become informed.
Border: Given that the World War II generation has had a high voter turnout, and also benefited from the G.I. Bill to encourage homeownership and education, I wonder whether encouraging and assisting in homeownership and education for today's youth would help with their voter participation.
Hauk: I would hope so. It seems to me that I think it's time for us to start taking some risks and trying some new things. We ought to do anything and everything we can that's reasonable to encourage young people to get involved in the political and governmental process. They are the future of this state, they're the future of this country, and we are derelict if we don't do that.
Baldassare: Looking at this from a California perspective: We have in our state relatively low voter turnout among Latinos - about 10 to 12 percent of the electorate in the last election, half of what's possible if all Latinos voted. It's partly an age issue, because Latinos are younger than non-Hispanic whites in the state. It's also an income and education and homeownership issue. If we don't see major improvements, particularly in education, but also in homeownership and income among Latinos in this state, we could very well live in a state where most residents are Latino 20 years from now and most voters are whites. When that day comes, we have to begin asking serious questions about whether our democracy can hold up to that kind of variation between who lives in the state and who votes.
Cain: Election day registration, which we turned down, would have made it easier for young people to participate. But when the new cycle picks up, they're more likely to show up. Minnesota gets a high turnout of 18-year-olds. The consequence of letting 18- to 21-year-olds vote at a higher rate, you're going to get more Jesse Venturas and Arnold Schwarzeneggers hint hint - because they're looking to do something new, something different. If you want 18- to 21-year-olds to participate more, there are structural ways to make that happen. The question is, Do you want them?
Audience Question: My organization is proposing a national initiative for democracy process that allows people to refine corporations out of the picture by saying only human beings can get into this process for or against an initiative. We are mimicking what we pay our employees, our Congressional representatives to do, by establishing deliberative committees and bias-free votes, people of all communities to come and discuss whatever initiative is going through this process. We are limiting what can be put into it in terms of wordage - 5,000 words, exempting whatever statutory stuff that you're changing so that it isn't too complicated. We're putting a self-enactment process into this so we don't have to necessarily go out and get signatures, but you can do that. We're trying to get to the point where people will say whether they'd like to have this high-tech process, which also allows Internet voting, using the same company the federal government uses to have servicemen vote from abroad.
Cain: As an advisory process, I don't have a problem with it. As a rule-making process, you can't keep corporate money out. You can't keep big money out because that will just run afoul the court's ruling. On a national level, you're just going to make it that much more expensive and it's going to be that much more special-interest driven.
What I would like to see more of are deliberative forums. Pull people together for a couple of days, take an issue - health care reform - and barrage them with lots of information for a couple of days, and then do your poll, so that it's enlightened public opinion. Then let that opinion inform public opinion-makers. That would be a better way to go than to hand it over to people directly to make choices when they're too busy to be as well-informed as they should be. We're talking about a public that's already disengaged on the simple task of choosing candidates, let alone wading through 5,000 words or more of an initiative.
Border: I think that's the end of our system of government as the founders envisaged it. There is no escape from real politics. In your system, the real politics would take place among the people who framed the proposition. To whom are they accountable? The one problem that our system really does address is the accountability problem. One of the unfortunate side effects of the entire initiative process is, once a proposition is put before the voters, the ramifications are no longer the responsibility of those who framed the initiative. You have so many examples of unintended consequences that have become law in this state. To expand that to the national level would be a serious mistake.
What do you think about adding a None of the Above choice to the ballot? Would that reduce voter apathy?
Hauck: Absolutely not.
Cain: I don't think "none of the above" does anything other than allow people to express frustration. It doesn't make a choice, and that's what you ultimately have to do.
Baldassare: Whatever we can do to raise voter turnout will help. I don't think people come out to vote "none of the above." They just don't go to vote.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers