Voting a product of where we are

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© St. Petersburg Times
published February 27, 2002

Women are more likely to vote than men.

The elderly are more likely to vote than the young. Married people are more likely to vote than single people, or even divorced or widowed people. Homeowners are more likely to vote than renters.

The more years of education people have, the more likely they are to vote. The more money they make, same thing.

White people are more likely to vote than black people, especially in Florida. But Hispanics in Florida are much more likely to vote than Hispanics nationally.

Those are some of the findings that will be released today by the U.S. Census Bureau as part of a report on voting in the 2000 presidential election -- which, as you might recall, did not go entirely smoothly here in Florida.

First the good news. Nationally, voter turnout in the U.S. rebounded in 2000 from the all-time low set in 1996. About 86 percent of registered voters reported going to the polls, the Census Bureau said, up from 82 percent in 1996.

You might be asking: Wait a minute, how come I often hear that only about half of Americans vote? That's true -- 55 percent voted in the last election, to be precise. But that's 55 percent of what's called the "voting age population," which is everybody over the age of 18.

In this study, the Census Bureau also used a more accurate yardstick, measuring turnout against the number of voting-age citizens. Nationally, that bumped voter turnout from 55 percent (of voting-age population) to 60 percent (of voting-age citizens).

Here in Florida, that makes an even bigger difference, because we have a larger population of resident aliens who don't vote. A puny 52 percent of Florida residents voted last year. But a much better-looking 60 percent of our citizens turned out.

The numbers look best of all when they are presented as a percentage of registered voters. Eighty-six percent is pretty impressive; it's hard to get 80-plus percent of anybody to do anything.

A striking theme in the Census numbers is that the easier it is to register and vote, the higher a state's turnout tends to be. All but one of the states that allowed registration on Election Day had turnouts higher than the national average. So did Oregon, using its first full mail-in ballot.

"The key to voter turnout," the authors of the report conclude, "is registration, an important factor in the willingness and ability of citizens to vote."

That might seem like a no-brainer, but there has been some dispute about it in recent years. A lot of people who were registered for the first time at the driver's license office, under the 1995 "motor voter" law, never showed up to vote. This undermined the make-it-easier argument.

But the message from the Census Bureau's study is: If you want to increase turnouts, keep trying to make it easier.

(Let's leave for another day the interesting debate over whether we want to make it any easier -- really, shouldn't a person at least have to get off the sofa to run the democracy?)

The other major interesting finding in the Census report is the list of factors that influence voting -- gender, age, education, income, residency. All of them point in the same direction: The more established a person is in life, the more likely he or she is to vote.

Women (61 percent) were slightly more likely to have voted in 2000 than men (58.1 percent). Of people ages 18 to 24, a very lousy 36 percent voted -- only half the rate of people ages 65 to 74, of whom 72 percent voted.

Other huge gaps existed in voter turnout between the lowest and highest groups in education (39 percent versus 82 percent) and income (34 percent versus 75 percent). Employed people outvoted unemployed people, 60 percent to 40 percent. Homeowners outvoted renters, 65 percent to 44 percent.

In general, this means that the American electorate is better off in life than the overall American population. That is a striking observation, and you have to ask the question: What if the other half of Americans suddenly decided to start voting? Would the landscape change dramatically?

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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