Voters who don’t can be the difference

Want to drive a candidate from the past election crazy with what-ifs?

Forget the discussion of who didn’t bother to vote and get them thinking about the people who cast ballots, but just didn’t vote in their race.

Many voters don’t vote in all races, for a variety of reasons. Some skip uncontested races because, what the heck, that candidate’s going to win regardless.

Others skip races where they don’t like either candidate, or don’t know enough to make an informed choice. When they don’t punch the card or fill in a circle in a particular race, it’s called an undervote. The elections computer counts those as a way of accounting for every ballot.

The problems with getting registered voters to cast ballots are discussed elsewhere in today’s paper. But for candidates who lose close races, the undervotes are an even bigger problem. Could you have picked up some of those votes with another knock on the door? Another flier in the mail? Another call from a volunteer?

Take the state House contest between Don Barlow and John Serben, which was decided by 260 votes. But 3,402 voters in the 6th District didn’t care or couldn’t choose, more than three times as many as in the state Senate race between Chris Marr and Brad Benson in the same district.

The county commissioner race between Bonnie Mager and Phil Harris was decided by fewer than 1,400 votes, but some 8,200 voters left that contest blank. The county assessor race saw incumbent Ralph Baker overcome challenger Judy Personett’s election night lead to win by about 6,000 votes. But more than 11,000 voters skipped that race.

But do they care?

Undervotes might also be considered a sign of general lack of interest in a campaign. This comes as a surprise to many candidates, who eat, sleep and breathe their campaigns for several months, but sometimes the voters just don’t care.

Maybe you just can’t make them. The Spokane County prosecutor’s race was high-profile and relatively hard-fought and had 11,200 undervotes. Not much fewer than the 13,132 in the county treasurer’s race, which was low-budget and low-key.

The judicial races, even the contested ones, often have a big “Who’s that?” factor, and this year was no exception. It probably doesn’t help that they’re always at the end of the ballot, where people are running out of steam after figuring out all those other races. All of the contested Spokane County District Court races had more than 30,000 “I don’t cares” in last month’s elections.

A careful look

Undervotes were studied as more than just a curiosity in Spokane County this November. Paul Miller, a voting systems manager from the secretary of state’s office, looked into the fact that they seemed to go up and down as time went on, much like the GOP vote totals, in those close races for county commissioner, assessor and state rep.

“No natural explanation was immediately obvious and a sinister interpretation of the data could potentially lead a losing candidate to make the charge that the lower percentage of undervotes was due to undervotes being tampered with by persons unknown,” Miller wrote in his subsequent report.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sinister interpretations leading to charges of tampering by persons unknown? What does he think this is, the 2004 governor’s race?

When Spokane politicians ascribe sinister motives, they by-gawd name someone, whether they can prove it or not.

But anyway, Miller concluded that Spokane County’s ballot procedures exceed state requirements and actually set the standards in some respects. (The elections staff probably couldn’t fit their heads through the doorway for a couple of days after reading that.)

After reviewing hundreds of ballots counted Nov. 7, and hundreds more counted Nov. 11, Miller came up with a non-sinister, and logical, explanation. The ballots counted in the first batch were marked early, and typically had five to 10 races unmarked. The ballots in the second batch were marked close to Election Day, and typically had only five to 10 races marked, so most of the races weren’t voted.

“Voters appear to be substantially more likely to return ballots with contests left unvoted close to the election,” he concluded.

In other words, as time runs out, people tend to vote for the folks they really like (or against the ones they really hate) and skip the rest.