Arkansas lags in voter turnout

If I offered you 10 bucks to name the state with the lowest eligible voter turnout in the last presidential election, and you said, “Arkansas,” you’d be 10 bucks richer.

With 54 percent of its eligible voting age population voting in 2020, the state ranked 51st, counting Washington, D.C. That’s according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s biennial report released in 2021. The national average was 67 percent.

The Arkansas Civic Health Index, a study released at the Clinton Presidential Center Dec. 4, dove deeper into those numbers. It relied heavily on the U.S Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households nationwide. The primary authors were four researchers from the Clinton School of Public Service and one from the University of Central Arkansas.

Findings include the not-surprising fact that women here were more likely to vote than men (56.2 percent versus 51.6 percent) in 2020. Also not surprising was the finding that older Arkansans were more likely to vote than younger ones. White, non-Hispanic voters (56.1 percent) were more likely to vote than Black Arkansans (44.7 percent).

Notably, the study said 73.2 percent of Arkansans age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree said they voted. That number was much higher than the 44.9 percent with a high school diploma and 32.3 percent with less than a diploma who said they voted.

The state whose motto is “Regnat Populus” (“The People Rule”) has trailed the national average turnout going back to at least 1980, the first year the state’s voter turnout rates were included in the report.

Among other findings, the study noted that only 35 percent of Arkansans trusted the federal government to do what is right half the time or more often, compared to 46 percent of Americans. (I’m surprised that second number is so high.) That low trust may be a factor in Arkansas’ low voter participation rates. Likewise, Arkansans ranked 48th in their trust of other people, with 61 percent saying they trusted others half the time or more often. Almost three-fourths of Americans said they did. On the other hand, 85 percent of the state’s eligible voters trusted election-overseeing officials at least a moderate amount, compared with 78 percent nationally.

One key to increasing voter numbers would be increasing voter registration. Janine Parry, a University of Arkansas political science professor, told the Arkansas Democrat- Gazette in 2021 that Arkansas makes it hard to do that. In fact, she said, “Arkansas, for 200 years, has designed a system to produce low voter turnout, and that system has worked exactly as designed.”

What could be done to change that? The Arkansas Civic Health Index’s recommendations include allowing online voter registration, enabling automatic registration when someone obtains a driver’s license, letting people register as late as Election Day, and letting 16-year-olds pre-register to vote.

Some of its other recommendations include having more polling locations, expanding no-excuse absentee voting and voting by mail, and revising public high school civics standards to require training in civic engagement and deliberative discussion.

One question that must be asked is, how much voter turnout do we need? In the 2020 election, 1,219,069 Arkansans voted. Is that not enough?

The counterpoint is that a more engaged citizenry is a hedge against power-hungry individuals who might want to take democracy away, or at least weaken it. Moreover, it’s better to have a broad and ample cross-section of voters with varying life experiences and perspectives, rather than a heavy concentration of certain groups, such as individuals with college degrees.

Turnout is probably adequate in the presidential races, which generate a lot of interest. But fewer citizens vote in other races including party primaries, which is where most contests are actually decided. Primaries force politicians to cater to a small number of engaged but typically more partisan voters, lest they get voted out by their own party. That’s a big reason Republicans and Democrats often can’t work together after elections, even if some might want to.

Let’s close with that famous quote by Benjamin Franklin. When asked about the kind of government the Founding Fathers had just created, he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

One way to keep it is for citizens to participate in it. How many is enough? I don’t know, but let’s try not to be last next time.

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Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 15 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.