For the past month, my mail-in ballot for the upcoming primary has been piling up on my kitchen table, collecting dust. Every day I walk beside him. I even put a pen on top of it, as a reminder to fill it out, to do my civic duty. But I couldn't even bring myself to open the seal.
And I'm hardly the only one.
Of California's nearly 22 million registered voters, only about 14% had returned their ballots as of Monday. Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., expects turnout to eventually reach 30%, ranking it among the lowest rates in modern history.
He and other experts offer all kinds of explanations for why this happens. The main factor is that very few people are motivated to vote or they do not feel the need to vote because not much will change either way.
In presidential races, for example, both the Democratic and Republican parties have largely decided on the winners. Like it or not, we're witnessing a rematch of the old men: Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump.
The Senate race to succeed LaFonza Butler, who was appointed to the seat after the death of Dianne Feinstein, is another example. Although the race is shaping up to be one of the most expensive in California history, few voters seem to care because a Democrat is all but certain to win in November, leaving party control of the Senate intact.
Add to this the versatile stall for your garden. Additionally, many voters are so busy working multiple jobs trying to make ends meet and raise their families that they may not even know there is an election going on. Not surprisingly, the percentage of votes returned was very small.
But I suspect something else is going on too, and it may become a more widespread cause of voter apathy in the coming decades, assuming our democracy survives that long.
We are used to hearing: “Vote for whoever you think is the best candidate for office or who best represents your interests.”
Now it's about mass manipulation of elections.
More fantasy football than cheering on the home team in red or blue. Chess is more than checkers. There is a slow shift underway from thinking of voting as a simple act of civic duty. Instead, it has become a series of strategic decisions and complex calculations made in a desperate attempt to elect a government of politicians who will actually improve our lives.
In practice, gamification looks like an obsession with reading polls in an attempt to gain an advantage or dispel rumors about your party. Or “waste” your vote on the candidate you want to win, even if the polls say he won't win, because you want to send a message to the political establishment. Or, my favorite, vote for a candidate you don't like in the primary to help a candidate you like win the general election.
Of course, this is not all new. We have been told for decades to “vote for the lesser of two evils.” The electoral process in this country has always been imperfect.
But now, with so many democratic ideals at stake in such an existential way and with razor-thin margins for so many candidates running in a deeply divided and mixed country, the election game suddenly seems necessary to get the results we want.
“There's this thing where a lot of ordinary voters act almost like the TV commentators they watch on Fox News or cable,” Mitchell told me. “A lot of our news now is infotainment, and a lot of infotainment about politics is like sports prowess. It's like post-game analysis about elections. And then people go into post-game analysis mode when they think about the election.”
Just consider the slew of third-party presidential candidates who may appear on the ballot in some, but certainly not all, states in November. This election season, in particular, rogue candidates can be used as particularly powerful players for gamification.
According to the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Government poll co-sponsored by The Times, Biden leads Trump by 18 points among California voters when the race is close. But when there are additional candidates in the mix — Cornel West, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Jill Stein, for example — that difference drops to 12 points. Opinion polls in swing states returned similar results.
Biden could lose the election if enough people are upset by the complex calculations of the gerrymander and choose to vote for a third-party candidate or just stay home.
These people also exist. A lot of them.
In recent months, she has attended crowded rallies for West and Kennedy. I've met many supporters who say they've heard all the warnings about using their votes to enable Trump's comeback, but they don't care. They don't want to play the game. They will either choose the candidate they like, hoping to move our political system left or right, or choose not to vote at all.
As a 30-year-old black woman told me in January, while waiting to meet West in a line that extended to the door of a Leimert Park café: “I'm looking for something different and something that feels real.” to me. I am not associated with any particular party. I feel like I just need something that I feel like I can resonate with. And someone who truly sees me as an individual.
If that candidate wasn't on her mail-in ballot, she wouldn't bother filling it out.
Then there's the gameplay we saw in Michigan's Democratic presidential primary two weeks ago.
Fed up with the Biden administration's policies toward the war and the resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza, more than 100,000 voters, many of them Muslims and Arab Americans, chose the word “noncompliant” on their ballots. It was a protest vote, aimed at pressuring Biden to call a permanent ceasefire — or lose crucial support in the Midwestern swing state.
Social media exploded with division over what it all means for the November election. Real experts and self-proclaimed vigorously argued that these electors either sent a strong message to Biden or accomplished nothing, depending on whether one chooses to count the actual number of uncommitted votes or just the percentage.
I won't interfere with the Rorschach test. But seeking to further game the system, activists are pushing for similar protest votes in other states, including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Washington. And in Washington, at least, it appears to be catching on, with a major union, UFCW 3000, agreeing to the noncommittal tactic ahead of that state's March 12 primary.
But I would agree with Maxwell Stearns, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of Parliamentary America: Less Radical Ways to Radically Fix Our Broken Democracy. He portrays what happened in Michigan as a “profound collapse” of our electoral process.
“What it really reveals is that there is a lack of meaningful options to register an intense position that goes against the party you naturally align with because of our two-party system,” Lee said.
Indeed, Stearns's book offers a multi-step strategy for fixing our elections in a way that makes it easier to elect better candidates, without having to resort to such manipulation. However, one could argue that the well-intentioned reforms we have already seen, whether that be choice-based voting or open primaries, have not helped much.
“These are the things that worked great for my graduate-level game theory course in college,” Mitchell said. “But in practice, there is an opportunity cost that accompanies a change in the electoral system.”
This opportunity cost can lead to voter confusion — or, in my case, anxiety and avoidance.
Which brings me back to why my ballot remains unopened on my kitchen table. It's about the Senate race.
If I were to vote for the candidate who best represents my interests, it would be Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland. But I also want to infuse progressive policies into the Senate, and I fear a vote for Lee would undermine that.
In the primary, Republican Steve Garvey has the support of 27% of likely voters, followed by Rep. Adam P. Schiff is from Burbank by 25%, according to a UC Berkeley/Times poll. In addition to Lee, who received 8%, another progressive candidate, Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, received 19%.
And in the general election for the top two candidates — and I don't even need a poll for this — Schiff will easily beat Garvey in heavily Democratic California. But the race between Schiff and Porter will be tougher, with Porter likely pulling Schiff to the left. And I should point out that this only happens because Schiff's campaign turned the election into a game, boosting Garvey's turnout among Republican voters in the primaries.
So, do we play or don't we play? I asked Mitchell what I should do.
He replied: “Vote for who you like in races where you know who you like.” “And if you don't know who you like in the race, just skip it. Make your life easy. Enter your ballot.”
I received similar advice Sunday night from a black woman who drove from Long Beach to a rally for Lee in South Los Angeles: “You just have to hope and vote.” They echoed the comments of Lee herself, who asked voters on Monday not to be discouraged by opinion polls, because this is the game.
Personally, I'm tired of playing. I dust off the ballot and vote for Lee.
