When the luckless people of Zimbabwe turn out in far greater proportions to vote in a hopeless election than people in this old democratic commonwealth, we have a problem. We will not know the precise figures for a while, but 18 percent or fewer of the eligible voters in Arkansas went to the polls Tuesday in the preferential primaries.
You may have to go back to 1924 to find a lower numerical turnout in a statewide biennial election. That year, some 194,000 persons voted in the preferential primary.
There are a few ameliorating factors. Since the conversion to four-year terms for state constitutional offices like governor, the off-election seasons tend to produce a lower turnout. Nothing drives people to the polls like a spirited race for governor. A larger factor was that not many people were moved to run for public office — any political office — in 2008. Up and down the ballot, from the U. S. Senate to justice of the peace, people ran unopposed. It was not because people were discouraged about running against deeply entrenched incumbent politicians. Men running for a seat for the first time got no opposition. That is not a good omen for democratic institutions.
Bifurcating the primaries so that we voted on presidential candidates in separate primaries on Feb. 5 did not help. That was Sen. Tracy Steele’s idea, and he persuaded the legislature and the governor to go along. The idea was that shoving the presidential voting into the first week of February would give Arkansas a far larger role in the selection of presidential nominees in both parties. Candidates and their retinues would come trooping into Arkansas like they do to New Hampshire and Iowa, producing an economic and public-relations bonanza for the state and driving up voter interest. It failed on every count.
Arkansas might have received more attention, at least in the Democratic race, if we picked our candidate last Tuesday. Surely, the legislature next January will rectify that mistake and move the presidential primaries to May again. It will save money, too. Statewide elections are expensive, and one is cheaper than two.
But that does not account for the political lethargy of the season. One culprit, we are convinced, is term limits, the constitutional restriction on longevity that is only now fully kicking in. By preventing long tenures in the Senate and House of Representatives, it was supposed bring droves of people into legislative elections. Powerful incumbents would no longer intimidate the ambitious.
But this is the result: Sixty-three of the 100 House seats in 2009 will be filled without a contest either in the primaries or the general election. Only three of the 17 Senate seats up for election are contested.
In 1996, in the early stage of term limits, 34 of the 100 seats in the House of Representatives were contested in the general election in November, but this year only 21 are contested. Six of the 17 Senate seats were contested by the other party but this year only one. So much for the rise of two-party politics.
The common explanation is that since representatives may serve only three two-year terms, those ambitious to serve tend to wait until the newly elected legislator completes his or her allotted terms (three in the House, two in the Senate), so once elected to the House or Senate a person is virtually assured of finishing his allotted terms without a contest. A House term now is effectively six years, a Senate term eight. Is that better democracy?
But something else is at work. Legislative office is not as attractive if you must surrender it when you have barely mastered the mechanics of lawmaking, and fewer and fewer people are taking the risk at all.
Candidates are increasingly winning legislative office simply by filing for the first time. In an ordinarily highly competitive Senate district in Little Rock last week, David Johnson won his first term without facing a Democratic or Republican opponent. He will enjoy eight years in the upper chamber without having to expose his ideas to the crucible of an election.
We can and almost certainly will cure the bifurcated elections next year by returning to a single primary, and maybe we are approaching the day that people will reconsider the false appeal of term limits and reinstate a full measure of democracy.
