Texans Won’t Vote Without a Reason and Most Don’t

October 16, 2012 5:29 am by: Ben Philpott

Fewer than half of eligible voters hit the polls in Texas even in presidential years. Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/KUT News

This story was reported for the “Why Bother” series in collaboration with KLRU and The Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. Find more at whybothertexas.org

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Forty-five percent of the Texas voting age population turned out for the 2008 presidential election. That’s about a half a percentage point below the 2004 election. Gubernatorial elections bring out less than 30 percent, and constitutional elections hover in the single digits. Our continuing series on the causes and solutions to low voter turnout reports on why Texans do and don’t participate in elections.

Get-out-the-vote efforts litter the Texas landscape, from partisan efforts focused on getting one party or another out to the polls to nonpartisan efforts that try to push the idea of civic participation. Then there’s the effort made by the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Hope Andrade.

“We hope that everyone who’s registered to vote goes out and votes on Election Day,” Andrade said. “I’m more focused on making sure that our registered voters have all the information they need.”

So for her it’s about reaching out to the people who are likely to vote and getting them to the right polling place on the right day. The state’s early voting, especially in larger urban counties, tries to put voting places where people usually go during the week.

“So if you’re on your way to work and you see a polling place, you can stop there,” Andrade said. “If you’re on your way to drop off your kids at school and you see a polling place, you can stop there. So this is very convenient. It’s accessible. Sometimes people say, I don’t have time to vote, or it takes too much time to vote. If you vote during early voting, it just takes a few minutes.”

But easy access to the polls just isn’t enough to get people to vote. And neither is playing to a person’s sense of civic engagement.

“There’s only a small part of the voters who votes because they think they should,” said Peck Young, director of the Center for Public Policy and Political Studies at Austin Community College. His previous career as a campaign strategist had him constantly trying to find and turn out voters across Texas.

The college just released a statewide study (PDF) looking at why registered voters don’t vote. Young says that contrary to some expectations, race isn’t the biggest predictor of who won’t vote.

“The poorer you are, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to participate,” he said. Both of those, income and education, do tend to skew along racial lines; the state’s Hispanic and African-American populations tend to be both poorer and less educated than whites.

But Young says the second biggest factor is whether or not you have anything to vote for.

“There’s also a phenomenon of people in local districts in which there’s no race don’t participate,” he said. “And of course in Texas, people don’t vote because Texas is not in play.”

Republican domination in statewide positions and the redrawing of local districts every 10 years leaves little in doubt after the party primaries.

But Young’s study did reveal one surprise. He says a key demographic, described as “breadwinners” in the study, was not voting. Those are middle-income homes with two working parents and at least one child. Young says this demographic should be at the top of any get-out-the-vote efforts.

“They’re not that hard to find, and they should be somebody who should be voting, and they should be able to be reached, and they should be participating,” he said. “And they shouldn’t be dropped off the list because they don’t participate. They should be a high-priority target to be motivated.”

But in the end it takes well-funded get-out-the-vote efforts to reach disengaged voters. Without a competitive statewide race, it’s hard to raise money for such an effort. Part of what makes a competitive race is voter interest, a cycle that often leaves voters asking, “Why bother?”

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