Sunday, September 05, 1999
Voters scarce in local races
'99 ballot full of impact, but fewer pay attention
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The closer to home an election is, the further away the voters are.
That's the way it goes in elections in the Tristate and all over this country. Presidential elections draw voters. Local elections, like the ones that go into full swing this weekend, bring out far fewer.
“It's a phenomenon that's been written about in the political science books for years,” said Gene Beaupre, a political science professor at Xavier University. “And nobody has ever really figured it out.”
This year in Hamilton County, and all over Ohio, voters will be electing municipal court judges, mayors, city council members, township trustees, and school board members.
It is hard to imagine elected officials who have more direct impact on the lives of voters — they educate their children, they put police on the streets to make neighborhoods safe, they fix potholes and pick up the trash.
“It's what matters most,” said Bev Morehouse, a 40-year-old office manager from Glen Este. “I can't imagine what could be more important than what happens in the place where you live.”
With hundreds of candidates and many issues on the ballot in southwest Ohio, there are interesting races this year.
In Cincinnati, for example, all nine council seats are up for election. Similarly, there are battles for council from Addyston to Loveland, from New Richmond to Monroe.
Most school districts will elect one or more board members. Every township has at least one trustee up for elec tion. Money issues are sprinkled throughout the region.
Yet the drop-off in voting from presidential races to local races is huge, and this year is not likely to be an exception.
Three years ago, when Bill Clinton was re-elected president, 71 percent of Hamilton County's registered voters showed up, as did 64 percent of Cincinnati's electorate.
Two years ago — the last in which only local offices were up for election — those turnout figures dropped to 44 percent and 39.5 percent, respectively.
Maybe, Mr. Beaupre said, the explanation lies in the fact that voters are too familiar with their local politicians to get excited about voting.
“If you're a city councilman, you can pass a piece of legislation and you meet the people it affects the next night in Kroger's,” Mr. Beaupre said.
The local politicians, Mr. Beaupre said, aren't put on a pedestal and admired or despised from afar the way national candidates are.
“There are no local heroes,” Mr. Beaupre said.
What it means is that candidates for local offices have to work harder to get their messages out.
“You meet as many people as you possibly can; you go everywhere,” said Jack Pollock, a project manager running for the second time for the Oak Hills Board of Education.
The main expense of a local school board campaign, Mr. Pollock said, is buying yard signs to help make people remember your name.
“You wear your campaign T-shirt to the high school football games; you speak to every community group that will give you five minutes on their agenda,” Mr. Pollock said. “It's hard work.”
Still, as Mrs. Morehouse said, voters don't often pay attention to what is happening with the local township trustees or school board “until something goes wrong. Then they want to know why nobody told them about it.”
One certainty of low-turnout local elections is that it means relatively small groups of people who favor one candidate or political party can have a mighty impact on the results.
That is why special interest groups like the AFL-CIO and groups that represent voting blocs, such as the NAACP, spend so much time and effort registering new voters and getting them to the polls.
Low turnout has consequences. In May, only 18 percent of Cincinnati's voters went to the polls to pass the most sweeping change in the city's electoral system in 70 years. It passed by 2,225 votes, which means if five votes per precinct had gone the other way, the ballot issue would have failed.
Retiree George Fortner of Price Hill voted in that election, as he does in all elections.
His one vote, the 69-year-old Price Hill man said, doesn't always make a difference, “but I want the politicians to know that I'm out here. That's what I tell everybody, that they should vote just to let them know we're here. We're real. We exist.”
Local candidates, said Judith Trent, a professor of political communications at the University of Cincinnati, “tend to be less interesting personalities than the people they see at the presidential, or even congressional, level.”
“They don't ever seem to be able to generate the glamour, the charisma, the excitement of a presidential campaign,” Dr. Trent said.
Mr. Beaupre said one reason the local elections don't attract as much attention from voters is that “local politicians don't have $60 million to spend, like a George W. Bush.”
In the end, though, Mr. Beaupre said the reason people vote in large numbers in presidential elections but not local ones has to do with history.
“In a presidential campaign, I think people feel a greater sense of importance in the ballot they cast,” Mr. Beaupre said. “They feel like they are changing history.”
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