In one of the most consequential primaries in decades, more than two-thirds of eligible New Yorkers didn’t bother to vote. Can that be fixed?
Despite the urgency of the moment, the mayoral primary on June 22 failed to capture the attention of even a simple majority of New Yorkers, so it was not without irony that the country’s eventual fascination with it was born of a bizarre, bureaucratic error. Treating the primaries as a Netflix series demanding a teaser weeks ahead of showtime, the city’s Board of Elections announced the preliminary results of ranked-choice voting earlier this week, before the final count was due later this month. Needlessly released, the new tabulations were initially inaccurate — phantom votes from a test run had been accidentally included in the tally — prompting drama, upheaval and the threat of cascading lawsuits.
The mistake was maddening, but also par for the course, given the board’s longstanding inefficiency, a matter attributable to an unwavering fidelity to patronage. “The safest place to hold a job in New York City — bar none,” Tom Robbins wrote in The Village Voice 11 years ago, “is the Board of Elections.”
Steeped in an era of machine politics, the board represents just one of the ways in which the election process in New York remains benighted and troubling. Low turnout in municipal elections is a persistent problem around the country, but the most recent primaries, unfolding at one of the most critical moments in the city’s history, delivered fewer than one-third of the city’s more than 3.7 million registered Democrats to the polls. If after a completed count, the total number of votes stands at the projected 940,000, the figure would be closer to a quarter. Either way it will be nearly impossible for anyone who wins to lay claim to a mandate.
Even more confounding is the fact that the recent turnout is considered robust. Railing on the board’s “fundamental structural flaws” on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio demanded an explanation for the bungling, citing the “record number of voters” who cast ballots as deserving more. The primaries did not, in fact, result in a record turnout — not when compared with various races in the 1970s and ’80s. They showed some improvement only over recent primary cycles.
Political hacks and longtime journalists have grown accustomed to the apathy, and they shrug at these figures as inevitable. Academics who study the electoral process, however, do not, and they regard the trend as a deeply concerning sign of withering civic health. Among the total number of registered Democrats in New York, roughly 280,000 are considered inactive, which means that they never vote, while another approximately 1.7 million — nearly half — have not voted in a primary in 13 years, according to Jerry Skurnik, a political strategist and data analyst.
In his book “Politics Is for Power,” the political scientist Eitan Hersh, a professor at Tufts University, described the phenomenon of “political hobbyism,” in which the educated and informed beam into the national scene as a consuming means of entertainment, ignoring what is not front of mind on CNN or Twitter. “You have people who care deeply about national politics but don’t really understand how power flows in their own communities,” he said. “But if you think about the high priorities of people on the left and the right — policing, housing — it’s all local.”
Academics have debated the ways in which we might maximize turnout for years. Making voting less of a chore would seem an obvious solution, but there is little evidence that certain convenience measures, like absentee balloting on demand, mail-in voting, or voting online expand participation in ways that broaden the demographics of those who vote.
One way to heighten participation would be to give everyone the day off to vote, including in primaries, considering that primaries, especially in major cities, so often determine the outcome of general elections. This has the potential to increase turnout among low-income voters, who are frequently beholden to inflexible work schedules and whose voices have for too long been underrepresented in the polls. Whether such an initiative would make a difference, we don’t really know, because we have not experimented with it.
There is one change that researchers do know is effective, but it has largely been ignored: aligning local and state elections with the federal cycle to make things simpler. “The proponents of the system we have argue that we don’t want local elections to be swamped by general elections,” Mr. Hersh said. “The other side of it is that no one votes in these elections.”
Although the 2013 mayoral primary in Los Angeles set a spending record, it generated a mere 21 percent turnout among registered voters, which resulted in rounds of shame and hand-wringing. Two years later, in response, Los Angeles voters approved an amendment that shifted the city’s primary and general election dates to even-numbered years to coincide with the wider election cycle. The first test of the new system, in March of last year, proved a success. The number of votes in some City Council races tripled and even quadrupled over the previous election. Presumably aided by the fact that local elections were placed at the top of the ballot, between 80 and 90 percent of those who voted in the presidential primary also voted in their council races.
Why changes like this have not been implemented in New York and everywhere has also been a recurring focus of inquiry. Sarah Anzia, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, has spent a good deal of time studying why so many municipal elections are out of sync and found that there was a period, in New York, during the 19th century, when city elections were indeed held concurrently with national elections. Progressive reformers fought this, though, as a means of weakening the power of the political machines. They held that separating things would allow people to vote on the merits of local issues rather than just vote thoughtlessly straight across party lines.
“It really profoundly shaped how we administer elections,” Ms. Anzia told me. “It has been a consistent pattern in American politics. When you move an election from an on cycle to an off cycle, it changes the composition of the electorate. In general, when you have an off cycle, you get an older electorate, you have fewer ethnic and minority voters.” Unions and other special-interest groups benefit from the status quo, she has argued, because they can exert greater control over elections when their constituents are largely the ones mobilized to turn out.
The tabulating mistake made by the Board of Elections was corrected the following day, but circumstances like it only threaten to abrade faith in the electoral process at a moment when faith in the electoral process isn’t at an all-time high to begin with. The skeptics don’t need more reasons to resist. The calls that have come now to dismantle the board and the way it does business should be joined by a movement to change the way elections are conducted — to invite everyone into the process more effectively.
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