Apathy by the numbers

What if we held an election and no one voted?  That won't really happen although what transpired in the elections held in the city of Los Angeles on March 7, 2017 are going to come darn close.  Projections made early on Wednesday estimated voter turnout in an election where the nation's second largest city chose a mayor for the next four years would be shocking in any other country on this planet.

In 2009, the incumbent mayor of Los Angeles,  Antonio Villaraigosa won reelection in a contest where only 17.9% of the registered voters went to the polls.  When you adjust that number to account for the fact that there are a lot of people who don't even bother to register to vote, you can see how few of the people make major decisions for those who don't care enough to take time to exercise one of our basic rights and responsibilities.

According to Los Angeles County Registrar of voters Dean Logan, he estimates that the turnout yesterday will be 1 to 2 percentage points lower than the then record low turnout in 2009. 

Ever hear the name Fletcher Bowron?  He served as mayor of Los Angeles from 1938 through 1953.  According to the Los Angeles Times, Mayor Bowron won reelection in 1950 with 432,000 votes.  The article making this claim states that Mayor Garcetti got over 202,000 votes yesterday.

I have a problem with the Times article since the last election Mayor Bowron won was held in 1949 (not counting recall efforts after that election), not 1950 and according to this source, Bowron tallied only 238,190 votes in his victory.  That represented 53.8% of the vote.

I've written to the author of the L.A. Times piece asking for a source for the vote total he wrote about.  I'll let you know what he says, if he responds.

Update:  Turns out the author of the L.A. Times piece was referring to the November 1950 special recall election that failed to remove Mayor Bowron from office.  Is it fair to compare the results of a special recall election to the regularly scheduled mayoral election?  I leave that to you to determine.

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Here are some more numbers showing election turnouts in our past:

1960	109,672	68,836	62.8%
1964	114,090	70,098	61.4%
1968	120,285	73,027	60.7%
1972	140,777	77,625	55.1%
1976	152,308	81,603	53.6%
1980	163,945	86,497	52.8%
1984	173,995	92,655	53.3%
1988	181,956	91,587	50.3%
1992	189,493	104,600	55.2%
1996	196,789	96,390	49.0%
2000	209,787	105,594	50.3%
2004	219,553	122,349	55.7%
2008	229,945	131,407	57.1%
2012	235,248	129,235	54.9%
2016	251,107	138,847	55.3%

Those are statistics from U.S. presidential elections since 1960 showing the percentage of the Voting Age Population, rather than the percentage of registered voters; who went to the polls.

2008 was the election of the first African-American to the presidency and less than 58% of those who could vote chose to register and do so.  Eight years later, in a critical election between a woman who could have been the first female U.S. president, and a completely unqualified blowhard billionaire, voter turnout was nearly 2% lower.

Why is there so much apathy among U.S. voters?  I'm sure many think that their vote doesn't matter.  I heard more than one person say just that about the election this past November and how they said it was remarkably similar for all of them.  "Why should I bother to vote, I live in California and no matter how I vote, Hillary will win the state."

Does the cause of this apathy really matter?  Only if we want to change the equation and get more people to the polls.