Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson released the final vote numbers for the May primary late last week and here’s one conclusion you could draw: We’re a mess.
Overall, 22 percent of the 4.4 million registered voters in Indiana cast their ballots in the primary, but a county by county breakdown of the numbers show some significant overs and unders.
For example, in southeastern Indiana, only 15 percent of Clark County voters voted. That’s the lowest in the state.
In Howard County, where Kokomo is located, 39 percent of the county’s 61,047 voters cast a ballot in the primary election. Boone County, just north of Indianapolis, came in a close second for highest voter turnout, with 37 percent. (County voting rates are online at www.in.gov/sos/elections.)
Some of it can be explained by the number and intensity of the local races that were contested. But that doesn’t explain it all. (Clark County numbers may be artificially low; a March tornado destroyed or damaged a lot of homes in the northern part of the county, displacing many people.)
For the past few columns, I’ve been asking readers to tell me why they did or didn’t vote, or to offer an antidote to low voter turnout.
One common theme that continues to emerge (subtracting out the “people are stupid” explanation) is the wariness of political party affiliation.
They don’t want to vote in the primary because they don’t want to declare themselves Republican or Democrat. Indiana has an open primary, meaning any Democrat can cross over and pick up a Republican ballot and vice versa. But some people would rather just opt out.
Andrew Straw is an attorney running for Congress as a Green Party candidate in Indiana’s 2nd Congressional district. He needs 4,000 signatures to get on the November ballot as a third party candidate.
He’s particularly irked that the candidate who won the Democratic nomination in the May primary got only about 11,000 votes — out of a district with 500,000 people — to get himself on the November ballot. (The Republican nominee got less than 48,000 voters to turn out for her.) “This is pathetic,” Straw wrote.
Elkhart County Commissioner Jerry Yoder, a Republican in a heavily Republican area around Goshen, wrote to tell me he was fed up with partisan labels too. In his primary contest, he said, he was labeled by some tea party supporters as “progressive.”
To undermine the effectiveness of that apparent slur, Yoder said he appealed to Democrats who usually skip the primary vote, asking them to cross over and vote for him. He won — with the endorsement of the Democratic mayor of Goshen — but not happily.
His idea for getting out more of the vote: “Make local elections non-partisan, much like school board elections.” Many cities across the U.S. (close to 75 percent, according a 2007 study) have embraced that idea. Is Indiana ready for that change?
Let me know what you think: Email me at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com.
Maureen Hayden is the Indiana Statehouse bureau chief for CNHI, the parent company of the Tribune-Star. She can be reached at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com.
Local & Bistate
STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: Voter turnout shows significant overs, unders
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