Month: March 2015

California has been struggling lately with voter engagement. Turnout in the 2014 statewide elections, both in the primary and the general, set record lows. Turnout among young voters was especially bad. A recent report from Mindy Romero of the California Civic Engagement Project showed that an abysmal 8% of 18 to 24 year olds cast a ballot in 2014. As Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc. dryly noted, “In California, an 18- or 19-year-old was more likely to be arrested this year than actually vote in one of the statewide elections.”

In this environment, California has been exploring and adopting all sorts of policy changes to improve turnout. One of these is preregistration: the practice of allowing voters who are not yet old enough to vote to place a flag in the system that will activate their registration as soon as they come of age. California has had preregistration for 17-year-olds since 2009, and for 16-year-olds since last year. However, neither reform will go into effect until the state completes work on a new voter registration database in 2016.

Most of the conversation around this reform has focused on making it easier to get more young people registered by expanding the window of opportunity for doing so. Yet interesting new research suggests there may be more to the reform than meets the eye.

In a recent paper in the prestigious American Journal of Political Science, John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus of Duke University find that young people who enter the voter rolls through preregistration vote at higher rates than young people who register the traditional way. Depending on how it is measured, the boost in youth turnout is anywhere from a modest 2% to a whopping 13%. While theirs is not the first research to suggest an impact from preregistration (see, for example, this report by Michael McDonald of the University of Florida), Holbein and Hillygus go to great lengths to isolate the causal impact of the reform itself. Thus, we can be pretty confident that the effect they find is real.

This is a very intriguing result. It suggests that there is something about the act of preregistration that makes young people more likely to follow through and cast a ballot. Even more amazing, the boost in turnout measured by Holbein and Hillygus came years after the young people first signed up.

What could be producing this effect? Though the authors can’t say for sure, they speculate that it may have something to do with the way young people participate in the preregistration program. Preregistration often occurs at special school events where there is a certain fanfare around the process. Such fanfare is likely to impact teenagers with extra force, since they are actively shaping their own political identities. In other words, this paper may tell us as much about the potential benefits of civic education in high school as it does about preregistration itself.

More generally, the research also reminds us that total turnout is not a good way of assessing the performance of reforms. California’s turnout has been horrible lately, and any single reform is not likely to alter that basic truth. But if we can identify reforms that improve matters at the margins, then enough of them might add up to a more substantial effect.

Turnout in the most recent Los Angeles City Council election was almost impossibly low: slightly less than 9% of registered voters, or about 150,000, cast ballots. Governance of a city of almost four million was in the hands a group that could squeeze into the Rose Bowl.

And yet this same select club did something on Election Day that all but guaranteed their membership will grow. The days of the “Rose Bowl electorate” are numbered.

LA City Council races fall in the spring of odd-numbered years and don’t coincide with state and federal elections. The City Council races also have voter turnout that is 20 or 30% lower than in state and federal races in neighboring years. The explanation for the difference is not complicated. Visibility and excitement are powerful drivers of turnout. Elections that receive attention across multiple media outlets—such as those for Congress and the presidency—create a buzz that voters find harder to ignore. To expect a similar buzz for stand-alone local races is to require a volume of coverage that those races almost never receive.

What makes the most recent City Council election so unusual is that two extraordinary measures, City Charter Amendments 1 and 2, were also on the ballot. They proposed moving City Council and school district elections to coincide with the federal and state elections that draw more voters to the polls. Even more amazing, the small, dedicated group who voted on these measures passed them by a 3-1 margin, effectively taking a step to end their own privileged position in city and school district politics.

Will this actually increase participation in these local races, or will voters get “ballot fatigue” and opt out when they get to the end of longer ballots? In a 2002 Public Policy Institute of California report, Zoltan Hajnal, Paul Lewis, and Hugh Louch concluded that about half the difference between local and federal turnout can be attributed to election timing. That suggests that the timing change will prompt most voters to weigh in on local elections, even if they are drawn to the polls by higher profile congressional or presidential contests.

The problem of low turnout in LA will not be solved by this policy change. There are clearly other factors driving turnout down, factors that consistently place LA County near the bottom of the turnout list in all elections. But in passing Charter Amendments 1 and 2, voters in LA have taken an important step toward encouraging higher participation in city elections, one that deserves serious consideration by other cities as well.