10:00am | At a recent 2nd City Council District candidate forum, an audience member asked what each of the candidates — Janet Ballantyne, Mike Kamer, and incumbent Suja Lowenthal — would do to increase voter turnout. Lowenthal’s answer was, basically: Make it easier to vote.

That strikes me as a counterproductive and silly suggestion, and should she emerge victorious Tuesday, we should all hope she’ll find better things to do with her time. Long Beach has lots of problems; the difficulty of voting in elections isn’t one of them.

To be fair, in answering the question Lowenthal made a valid point about the otiose nature of holding elections on Tuesdays. It’s an antiquated notion, and I’m sure switching to Saturdays would bring more people out to the polls.

But instead of striking a pose meant to signal love for democracy and America and apple pie, let’s be blunt: Voting is extremely easy, and people who don’t vote under the current system are so disengaged that we’re probably far better off without their participation.

According the California Secretary of State, to register to vote you must be…

  • A United States citizen,
  • A resident of California,
  • 18 years of age or older on Election Day,
  • Not in prison or in county jail (serving a state prison sentence or serving a term of more than one year in jail for a defined “low-level” felony), or on parole, post release community supervision, or post-sentencing probation for a felony conviction […], and
  • Not found by a court to be mentally incompetent.

You can register to vote online, or “[y]ou can pick up a voter registration form at your county elections office, library, or U.S. Post Office. It is important that your voter registration form be filled out completely and be postmarked or hand-delivered to your county elections office at least 15 days before the election.” You can also register to vote at any Department of Motor Vehicles branch.

You don’t need to speak English1; there’s not even a literacy requirement, let alone a test to determine if you have the slightest bit of knowledge about any issue, candidate, aspect of government, etc.

You also don’t need to show up at a polling place on Election Day: anyone who so chooses can request an absentee ballot, which is mailed to your home.

Whether or not all of this is as it should be, the point is that, even with elections being held on Tuesdays, it takes next to no effort to cast your ballot.

In 1993, I voted against the National Voter Registration Act (a.k.a. “the Motor Voter Act”) precisely because I felt it was already so easy to register to vote that there was no reason to expend resources on making the process easier. After all, I figured, is voting really about getting as many people as possible to vote, even people so little engaged that they couldn’t be bothered to pick up a form at a post office or register with one of those guys standing with a clipboard on campus or in front of Vons? Hell, one of my first jobs ever was calling people at home and registering them. We needed to make the process easier?!

No doubt there were nuances in favor of “Motor Voter” that were lost on me; likewise, there were consequences to its passage I did not envision, such as an increase in voter fraud. Not to mention that data seem to support my original misgivings. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in 2001, “Only about 5% of motor-voter registrants usually vote […].”

It’s all warm and fuzzy to talk about the importance of increasing voter turnout; and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone gladdened by the pathetic state of voter participation in the United States. But if we’re going to talk seriously about such issues, let’s discuss ways to create a better-informed electorate. Because perhaps the only aspect of American elections more depressing than how few of us make our voices heard is how uninformed so many of those voters are.

More voters does not equate with more engaged voters. And really, if in every election the voter turnout were half what it is currently, but that half were doubly well informed, we would be living in a better country.

FOOTNOTES

[1] I am unaware of how many linguistic flavors there will be this time around, but to give an idea, according to the California Secretary of State, for the statewide special election of 2003 ballots were mailed in seven different languages: “English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and Tagalog.”