Voting Apathy: The New Epidemic

Yesterday I was one of the select few citizens in the St Louis metropolitan area who was able to make a difference in their government; I was able to vote on a Monday! It was the special election between two incumbent Democratic state representatives who shared almost identical voting records, Stacey Newman and Susan Carlson. Since their one vote difference primary election in August was too close to call after some voting errors were discovered, the county decided to have a special re-election just for our district to allow for a definite winner to be cast. In the past few weeks I have been heavily bombarded with postal mailings, automated phone calls and then finally real human phone calls (one from the actual Stacey Newman herself) asking me to go and vote.

So yesterday I did my civic duty and spent an extra 5 minutes while going home from work and voted. I was expecting that after such a close election before and so many mailings and calls the voter turnout would be much higher than in August. The result, however, was very discouraging to me -- almost exactly the same number of people voted. In August (when I did not vote) 3,633 votes were cast and this time 3,645 were cast, about 15% of registered voters in both cases. This time Newman won by less than 100 votes (1,861 to 1,766) but it was a big enough margin to call the race without any voting errors. I am guessing the other 85% of registered voters in my districts were bombarded with the same mailings and phone calls that we were, so I was curious why more people did not spend a few minutes like I did and vote. With only one issue on the ballot the process was incredibly speedy at my polling location (Second Baptist Church in Richmond Heights) and I was in and out of there in no time. I showed up right around 5:00pm when you would think there might be some other folks voting after work, but I was the only voter there.

The fact that the two candidates were very similar in many ways (well educated, progressive, Jewish women Democrats who always voted for public education, women's issues and LGBT rights) may have made some folks feel it did not matter which was elected. I think it is a shame that the redistricting had to occur at all to keep both of these women from representing the area, since representatives of their demographics are rare in the Missouri House.

The redistricting of the 87th District for this election made me curious about the "missing" votes I had turned up in the township votes for the April 2012 Ladue School operating tax increase election. Back then I had calculated that 1020 Yes votes and 477 No votes were not included in the votes for the three townships that had made up 100% of the voting in the 2010 school bond election. So I had to look at the township maps and noticed that the Midland Township map now looks like it dips down into northeastern Olivette, and when I looked in the Midland election results, sure enough it was 1020 Yes and 477 No votes for the school bond issue in April. So I found my missing votes! It appears that since the 2010 election they must have changed the St. Louis county township boundaries.

Township Map 2002

Township Map 2012

This new information makes the distribution of votes in the Ladue School District very interesting for the April tax election. The two northern townships, Creve Coeur and Midland, both had very strong support for the tax increase, winning by over 500 votes in each township for a total winning margin there of 1,084 votes. The two southern townships, Missouri River and my own Clayton, however, had almost identical 57% No votes with a total of 585 more No than Yes votes in those two townships:

	Yes	No	% Yes	% No	Diff	Total Votes
Midland	1020	477	68.14%	31.86%	543	1497
Creve Coeur	2013	1472	57.76%	42.24%	541	3485
North Total	3033	1949	60.88%	39.12%	1084	4982
Clayton	1375	1840	42.77%	57.23%	-465	3215
Mo. River	346	466	42.61%	57.39%	-120	812
South Total	1721	2306	42.74%	57.26%	-585	4027
Grand Total	4754	4255	52.77%	47.23%	499	9009

I am not sure why they have to keep changing the township boundaries, but now I know I will have to check the Midland township too!