New York: How Low Can You Go?

Although midterm elections usually have a significantly lower voter turnout than presidential election years, this year’s turnout in New York State was the lowest since the 1970’s. This exceptionally low voter turnout in the state was evidently seen in the gubernatorial race between Governor Andrew Cuomo and his Republican opponent Rob Astorino. The governor was reelected despite receiving the fewest number of votes of any New York governor since Franklin Roosevelt in1930. The catch about this statistic is that the population of New York has gone up from 12.6 million in 1930 to19.7 million so this just goes to show how low this year’s voter turnout actually was.  

 

                                                              (The Buffalo News)

 

Only 3.7 million out of the 10.8 million active voters in New York decided to go out and cast their vote in Tuesday’s election. This was the first time that voter turnout dipped below the 4 million mark in the state, and typically a turnout of 4.3 million is considered to be a low turnout so this year’s turnout might be something to monitor more closely in state elections to come.

What factors could have contributed to a historically low voter turnout? This is the question that many political scientists in the state are going to be trying to figure out in the upcoming days and months. One potential cause of the low turnout could be that many races in the state are virtually not competitive whatsoever. For example, the Republican candidates in Upstate New York were predicted to win by significantly large margins as were the Democratic candidates in New York City and the surrounding areas. Knowing that a certain candidate is going to win decreases voter turnout because the members of the predicted winning candidate’s party aren’t going to vote because they don’t have to, and members of the losing candidate’s party aren’t going to vote because they know that their candidate isn’t going to win no matter what so they feel as if their vote is pointless.

 A solution for this lingering problem, and one that could increase voter turnout across the state is to redraw districts to make them more competitive. This would work extremely well in theory because competition increases voter turnout, but will state officials actually do such a thing? I think not. They would rather redraw districts to increase their chances of being reelected which just further decreases voter turnout. So another and more likely solution would be to have term limits on state officials and representatives. This in return would make elections more competitive because when an incumbents aren’t in the election it makes the race more competitive and both parties spend more money on the campaigns where there isn’t an incumbent.