Editorials
O'Gara, James
GETTING OUT THE VOTE SENATOR KENNEDY'S withdrawal from the presidential sweepstakes can be counted on to give new impetus to the already vigorous 1984 presidential race. Vigorous at least as far as...
...We agree, and the time to have such a national discus-sion is now, before the all-out campaigning begins...
...We may be the bastion of the free world, as the Fourth of July speeches have it, but almost half of our citizens do not take the trouble to go to the polls...
...A related flaw in the electoral process, and one that should be easier to cope with, showed up very strikingly last time around when early projections on national television networks announcing Jimmy Carter's defeat, followed by his very early concession, discouraged people from voting at all in the still-open polls in the West...
...Subtract from that 1980 figure the number who cast their ballots for John Anderson and for Jimmy Carter, and you can see what a minority of Americans actually determined that Ronald Reagan would be the president of the United States...
...They get bored - and cynical - as the rhetoric goes on and on, and a good many commentators think this boredom is a good part of the reason so many Americans fail to vote...
...But technical proposals should not be ignored either, they would help to some extent...
...In the Carter-Reagan contest in 1980, only 52.4 percent of the country's eligible voters cast ballots, the lowest turnout in a presidential election since 1948, when 51.1 percent of the electorate voted in President Truman's race against Thomas E. Dewey...
...As everyone knows, millions of Ameri-cans simply do not bother to vote, not only in off-year elections but in presidential contests...
...It has been going down in every election since...
...supported such a plan, telling the Senate Rules Committee that many voters in his state went home without having voted after they heard the networks proclaim a winner in the presidential race...
...Granted, this is an experiment, but at this point almost any reasonable experiment is worth trying...
...Secondly, and more impor-tantly perhaps, it is argued that campaigns of such length simply wear voters out...
...Anyone already in public office cannot campaign on the extended timescale required without blatantly neglecting his official duties...
...Yet when the Democrats voted earlier this year to shorten the period allotted for their party's formal nomination process, some people complained that the move in fact favored already well-known candidates and professional politi-cians...
...There may be something in this, but then how about a voluntary ban on projections before the polls close...
...This is a subject that needs considerably more thought and discussion...
...It is almost if not quite true that when it comes to voter turnout, the only way the United States can go is up.s up...
...First of all, the long-drawn-out campaign almost ensures that only the "unemployed" public figure can really find time to run in the total way it has to be done...
...One result: defeat by a relatively few votes for candidates like longtime Democratic Congressman Al Ullman of Oregon...
...Indeed, if one leaves out countries where voting is compulsory, the United States ranks last among fifteen democracies in voter turnout...
...Senator S. I. Hayakawa (R.-Calif...
...And refining that idea, an increasingly discussed suggestion would shift the president-ial election to a twenty-four-hour day on Sunday...
...Another suggestion: synchronize opening and closing hours, but with the polls open everywhere for a full twenty-four hours, to encourage greater voter participation...
...Other and more fundamental proposals to bolster voter turnout have been put forward...
...In one way this might look like a sign of political health, but it is bad for at least two reasons, some argue...
...Campaigning in 1980 began a full twenty-six months before the election...
...Voting hit a high of almost 63 percent in 1960, the year of the Kennedy-Nixon contest...
...Further, the television people argue that legislative action would interfere with this nation's traditions of a free press and with citizens' First Amendment rights...
...The hope here, based on the experience in other countries, is that this shift would greatly increase voter turnout, and the proposal has been commended by former Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Car-ter, at least to the extent of urging that the idea be thoroughly aired...
...For instance, one problem that many experts cite is the sheer length of the presidential campaign, which seems to expand every four years...
...They say there is no hard evidence that early projections actually change the outcome, although candidates like Al Ullman vigorously disagree...
...There are many complicated reasons for this state of affairs, reasons deep-seated in contemporary American culture and for which no purely technical improvement will supply a solution...
...One suggestion: make polling hours uniform across the country, so that polls in New York and in California would close at the same time...
...They had been disenfranchised by a system that al-lowed an election to be called while the polls were still open.'' The TV networks do not like the idea of any such restriction...
...Nor was this a special case, a freak occurrence when the voters were simply turned off by both candidates...
...This is what is urged by the League of Women Voters and other civic groups, yet the TV networks do not like that solution either...
...Some months ago a Senate committee held hearings on proposals to limit TV networks' projections of election results before the polls close in the West...
...Voters in the Western states believed that voting was a useless exercise," he said...
...Vigorous at least as far as the presidential hopefuls go - how the voters feel about the question may be another matter...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 22
