Primary Colourless As Americans Fail To Vote

Eric Ellis, Springfield, Oregon

05/23/1998

The self-styled Land of the Free this week displayed an apathy that would horrify many Indonesians prepared to die for US-style liberties. While Indonesians were throwing off a 32-year-old dictatorship, the country many young Asians claim as a model could not be bothered even showing up for its various local referendums, primaries and gubernatorial polls.

Why? Because life is so good in the booming US, there is little to get worked up about. "Everyone seems to be working, you know, they get up at eight o'clock, come home at five, and go to dinner and go to bed. They don't look around and think about jobs these days, because there's so many of them," said political strategist Sig Rogich of Nevada, the State with the US's biggest growth rate.

"We're all kind of creatures of habit and when the good times are here, I think we have a tendency to look less at our elected officials than we do otherwise."

While some may dispute that in this shaken community of 50,000 where yesterday a high school student here wasted his parents and classmates in yet another small town school shooting outrage, voters in Oregon, in President Clinton's home State of Arkansas, and in the US cradle of democracy, Pennsylvania, stayed away from local elections in numbers that would shock Philadelphia's founding fathers.

In Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, best known for its reclusive Amish community, some booths were showing a paltry turnout of nine per cent. Just 13 per cent was the turnout for the county.

In most districts in wealthy Oregon, home to the giant Nike group and a burgeoning technology sector, the average was under 25 per cent.

Statewide, absentee voters look set to outnumber polling booth voters. In Pennsylvania, voting was so slow that election officials sent home bored colleagues.

"I'm calling it `primary colourless'," said Florindo Fabrizio, clerk of elections in Pennsylvania's Erie County.

"We could be nude and no one would know the difference," said Ms Nancy Glerum, an official in Oregon, a State famous for its social activism.

Americans are notoriously apathetic voters with turnouts under 40 per cent the norm rather than the exception, but officials say this week's polls, the first of a spate of nationwide elections, including the contrast to the money being spent by candidates. crucial California governorship, are under half the normal turnout.

"We're on a trajectory for a new low," said Phil Keisling, Oregon's chief elections officer.

The low turnout seems in direct contrast to the money being spent by candidates.

Oregon and California have both set records for campaign spending, in California the mark set by the deep pockets of Democratic governor contender Al Checchi, the former chairman of Northwest Airlines.

The apathy sends mixed signals. In business, media companies such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox are busy developing local programming content to counter market research which shows consumers in a backlash against local issues.

And yet these elections are fundamentally about local issues, from State governors to sheriffs and district school boards.

Political analysts attribute the apathy to the strong economy.

Says Mr John Pittnet, political science professor of California's Claremont College: "During the early 1990s, political debates were about riots, they were about the economic recession, about response to natural disasters.

"None of these things are happening right now in California so the atmosphere is pretty dull and people just aren't following politics."