MANSFIELD – A royal blue Ford Escape parked in the lot behind the Richland County Board of Elections has a license plate that reads, “1 VOTE.”
Appropriately, that vehicle belongs to Board of Elections Director Paulette Hankins, who after 33 years as director knows better than most the difference even one vote can make in an election. One election story in particular comes to mind, where Hankins’ license plate was taken quite literally.
“About 20 years ago, we had an Ontario council race between Bobby Shook and Barry Lewis,” Hankins recalled. “Bobby won it by one vote.
“That’s why they call him Landslide Bobby,” she added with a laugh.
The deciding vote boiled down to one provisional vote, cast by a voter who had moved to Richland from Ashland County. The voter was not yet registered in Richland County and voted by provisional ballot, and ended up deciding the election.
That scenario isn’t all that uncommon at the local level. According to Hankins, local races are often won or lost by 10 votes or less. Sometimes, the election can even end up tied – in this case, the winner is determined by a coin flip.
Imagine that: The next mayor of your city, the next member of your local school board, decided by a silver coin balanced on thumb and forefinger and pinged upwards, the verdict decided by the coin as it falls. It’s a tiebreaker tradition practiced even at the state level, albeit much less frequently.
Some people might be uncomfortable with the idea of an election left up to chance. However, far more people are comfortable with an election left in the hands of anyone other than themselves based on the percentage of people who do not vote in their local elections.
In the 2016 election, there were 82,032 people registered to vote in Richland County, but only 56,106 ballots cast. That equates to a 68.4 percent voter turnout, and 25,926 people not exercising their right to vote.
These numbers were mirrored nationally in the 2016 election. Across America, there were approximately 230 million people eligible to vote but only approximately 139 million ballots cast, according to the U.S. Elections Project. That equals a 60.2 percent voter turnout rate nationally, and approximately 91 million people not voting.
When too few people vote in local elections, a small fraction of residents can have outsize influence in decisions about critical issues like schools, parks, housing, libraries, police and transportation. But the question of why people aren’t voting is still a puzzle.
“I don’t understand it,” Hankins said. “I wish I did.”
According to the Richland County Board of Elections, there are currently 124,475 people living in Richland County. Of that population, there are 94,601 people over the age of 18, and therefore eligible to vote. As of Nov. 1, 2017, there were 82,114 people registered to vote – 86 percent of the population eligible to vote.
A 68.4 percent voter turnout rate in 2016 is one of the better rates for Richland County, largely due to the presidential election. Voter turnout rates are traditionally higher in presidential years; in 2012, the voter turnout rate was 78.30 percent, and in 2008 the voter turnout rate was an impressive 90.05 percent, with 85,168 ballots cast out of 94,579 people registered.
These numbers drop significantly during the in-between years. Sometimes the numbers are bolstered by a state issue or a mayoral race, such as the 2009 election with Amendment 3 authorizing the construction of casinos in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo. This issue prompted a 45.53 percent voter turnout in Richland County.
However, election years absent of any major national or state issues fare even worse. In 2013, a year of no state issues, the voter turnout in Richland County was only 25.05 percent – out of 89,049 people registered to vote, only 22,304 cast a ballot.
And that’s only looking at general elections held in November. Spring primary elections, Hankins said, are a totally different beast, with voter turnout percentages sometimes dropping in the single digits; in the May 2009 primary election, the city of Mansfield had 34,712 registered voters and only 1,945 people cast their ballot, resulting in a 5 percent voter turnout.
“They want to come vote every four years for the presidential, but the local races affect you a lot more directly,” Hankins said. “The township trustees and the school boards, the local council races, they affect you a lot more directly than any presidential election is ever going to.”
The uneven distribution of voter clout continues when breaking down the demographics of the population that does vote. Within low voter turnout numbers, it’s mostly the older population that is voting, and participation levels vary neighborhood by neighborhood. In other words, a limited portion of each city is determining who represents everybody.
Broken down by neighborhood, sometimes only one part of the city or county is determining how the rest of the jurisdiction lives. In the same May 2009 primary election in Mansfield, of the 1,945 total ballots cast, 14.26 percent of those ballots came from Mansfield’s first ward. By contrast, only 1.66 percent of the ballots came from Mansfield’s fifth ward.
The decision can be analyzed even further looking at individual voters within those wards. According to Hankins, the difference between voter turnout for voters over the age of 60 versus voters under the age of 35 is “astronomic.”
In the 2013 general election, where only 22,304 people cast their ballots, 10,415 of those people were over the age of 60. Only 1,524 voters were under the age of 35.
“We’ve always noticed that,” Hankins said. “You can sit in here and watch the early voting, it’s always the older couples. It’s very rare to see a younger person at the counter waiting to vote early.”
That means older voters are deciding on issues that overwhelmingly affect the younger generations, who aren’t voting. For example, younger voters may have school-aged kids who would be affected by school board races and levies, but those voters aren’t participating in that decision.
“If you’re voting on an income tax levy, the older generation who doesn’t have income that is taxed will be deciding on whether your income is taxed or not,” Hankins added. “It’s really frustrating, and it’s especially frustrating to us in here.
“Maybe the older you get, the more it’s inbred in you to vote; maybe they’re more used to it,” she said. “I’m not sure the reasoning.”
A coin flip isn’t the only time money becomes a factor in an election. At the Richland County Board of Elections, it costs an average of $150,000 to $200,000 in operating costs per election, depending on personnel and supply costs.
The poll worker payroll alone for an election, including training compensation, is approximately $60,000, according to Hankins. The budget for the Board of Elections comes from Richland County’s General Fund.
“It takes the same amount of prep work whether 80,000 people vote or 40,000,” Hankins said. “It does cost more in a higher turnout presidential election because we have more early voters and mailed ballots, and that requires more extra people to work here.”
Calculating the same amount of work per vote regardless of turnout, that means a low turnout year would cost Richland County nearly twice as much per voter as a high turnout year.
Costs alone motivate the Board of Elections to do everything they can to promote voting within Richland County. During presidential years, much of the legwork is done via advertising purchased by candidates – in 2016, the two presidential candidates spent $7,552,724 on television and radio ads just during the week of Oct. 30 to Nov. 5, 2016.
During an off year, it’s up to local efforts like legal ads in the newspaper or school presentations on voting, with the hope that a student will take the knowledge and enthusiasm about voting home to their voter-eligible parents.
But Hankins realizes while you can lead a citizen to the polls, you can’t make them vote. Despite their efforts to get the word out, the Board of Elections is already predicting a low 32 percent turnout rate for Tuesday’s general election in Richland County.
“We don’t see anything that’s really going to drive the vote up,” Hankins said. “We try everything, but it seems futile at some point.”
