Welcome to our politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina political science professor at the University of Houston.

Brandon Rottinghaus a political science professor, also here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for talking about politics with us.

We're going to take a little break from the kind of day to day grind of it all.

I know I need a break.

I know that you need a break.

I'm sure that everybody else needs a break.

And let's talk about something that's less depressing, I guess.

And that's about voter turnout.

Why is this so low?

It's relatively less depressing, but it's an important question because Texas is almost always on the bottom of the states when it comes to the list of voter turnout.

And we don't like that.

We think Texas is the best at everything.

Barbecue football, like, you know.

Yeah, breakfast tacos.

yeah.

We can debate where the best breakfast.

That's a different thing.

Collectively, we have the best breakfast taco.

So why is voter turnout so low?

So we're going to talk a lot about what political scientists say about this.

We'll talk about Texas specifically.

We'll look at the demographics of the state, which has a big say in terms of why turnout is so low.

But the last thing we're going to do is talk about what I think is the most important thing, and that's how to improve things.

This is a menu of options and there's like hundreds of ways we could make things better.

Let's just pick a few, right, That really might solve this problem.

So let's get started at the top.

And that's just to explain why voter turnout is so low in Texas.

Now.

It's low generally, like if you compare it across.

But Texas compared to other states is even lower.

So what's going on in the Lone Star.

State, Wolf?

Well, I think there's a lot of dynamics, right, that all intersect and create lower turnout.

Yeah.

So I'm going to start from the, I guess, less complicated one.

But, you know, the first one is we have an election every single year.

Yeah, right.

So there might be some, quote unquote, voter fatigue.

That's good, right?

Yeah.

Elections are at the state level, not very competitive.

You know, historically, Texas has been a one party system.

Democrats reign for 100 years, ride 94 comms, Republicans turn.

And here we are.

Right.

So lack of you know having competitive races at the state level and real competitive races might be the case.

But I also think that, you know, as you said, demographics play a very important role, especially when you're looking at the inclusion of new voters almost every two years.

Right.

You have a big chunk of that.

And part of that also is that, you know, Latinos represent a majority of that population.

So when you compare 2020 with 2010 in the last census, you know, 95% of of the of the of the growth was a tribute to minorities and almost more than half was attributed to Latino.

Yeah.

So there are implications there in terms of that and also how the demographic or the age pyramid may be distributed amongst within the Latino electorate is that simply a lot of them are already or too young to vote.

So you have a changing electorate that keeps adding more and more and more numbers to that denominator.

Yeah, right.

But is not growing fast.

The numerator is.

Or he's not growing.

Yeah, I agree.

All of these things are definitely problematic.

And we've seen Texas turnout swing from like 35% of the voting age population to sometimes above 50%.

But it's pretty rare and that's not a good place to be.

Right?

You see routinely millions of people who don't vote, who are otherwise eligible to vote.

So part of it is just getting people registered to vote.

That in of itself is a barrier.

Right?

Right.

Some states don't have a registration process like you are automatically registered to vote.

We call it automatic voter registration.

Sometimes it's done online, which makes it even easier since, you know, we do everything online.

I haven't been to like a target in, I don't know, five years because you can buy stuff on Amazon if you plan ahead.

So that's just the world that we live in.

But like our voting process is not in that world.

So that by itself, the registration process, which is cumbersome to some degree, is another part of it.

Generally speaking, the way political scientists think about this is that it's about cost, cost of voting.

And the cost can be lots of stuff.

It can be your time, it can be the information it takes made for you to have to research to see where to go vote or who you want to vote for.

So that cost is high enough in some places that voter turnout is just going to be lower.

So I looked at some of the reasons why people say that they don't vote and the sort of congressional cooperative election survey does this every two years.

And they ask people kind of if you didn't vote, why didn't you vote?

So the biggest reason that people didn't vote in Texas is was take a guess what what what do you think is the biggest reason?

I don't know.

Time consuming.

Too.

Time consuming.

Yeah.

Actually, what they say is that they forgot or they're too busy.

So that's 36% of the people who don't vote say that that's the case.

Is that a real thing?

Maybe.

Right.

It could be just convenience, but that's a big number.

And the reason it's big is that it is hard to vote.

Right.

It does take more time.

You really have to want it.

The second biggest reason is that people said they didn't have the correct form of I.D.

or didn't think they had the right form of I.D.

And we know from other work that sometimes people don't think they have the right form of I.D., but they actually do.

So these are some of the big issues.

And I do think that that's something that that has to be fixed.

And some structural things cannot be fixed.

But there are some real limitations.

So let me ask you more in detail about the Latino turnout, because this is a huge issue because Texas is becoming rapidly a majority minority state, and that is going to have profound implications for the demographics, the politics, as well as the turnout.

So the Hispanic population in Texas is the second in the country.

Right?

Right.

This is big four in ten Hispanics are eligible to vote ranking Texas about 17th nationwide.

But by contrast, about three quarters of the state's white population is eligible to vote.

So if you just do some simple comparisons there, it's a demographic issue, but it also has sort of translated to these political issues.

So as you said earlier, this is a young state that's becoming much more kind of diverse.

The question is, how do you change the way that people think about politics or how we approach elections to get people to come out to vote who otherwise wouldn't?

Well, I think, you know, first of all, when you're thinking about a Latino electorate is you're going to think of it as, you know, as as non-Hispanic whites.

Right.

Why?

Because within Latinos, I think you have at least three different electorates.

Right?

You have those that cannot be registered because they're too young or they simply can't.

Those are registered and do not vote for whatever reason.

And then those who are register and actually vote.

Right.

So when you look at them and start, you know, putting the pieces together, you get a very different picture.

Right.

Latino turnout has been increasing slowly.

Right.

But because you have more people and therefore.

They're adding more people.

There are more people.

So yeah.

So it's it's it's something that is happening but is happening at a lower pace that we would like to see.

The other very important part is how, you know, political socialization is taking place.

So political socialization doesn't have to do anything with indoctrination or anything like that.

It's just, you know, normal civic education.

So when you're talking about, for example, second generation migrants, right?

Latinos, Mexican-Americans or Venezuelan Americans, Salvadoran Americans, etc., etc., that have grown in the U.S..

Right.

Were born in the U.S. and still are going through that political socialization process.

You know, at school with social studies classes, etc., etc.. Yeah, there's not necessarily a focus on civic education.

Interesting.

I mean, the school curriculum does not focus on civic education.

Yeah.

Not Partizan.

Just normal civic education.

Why voting is important.

Why this is important?

Why how these works, etc.

etc.

etc.

is extremely important.

You don't have it right.

You're not creating those have it in terms of your participation is important.

The second important point is that when you're looking, for example, at, you know, third, fourth, fifth Latino generation kids, you know, they behave like a normal average voter.

Yeah, right.

Because that political socialization has taken place.

So what you need to do is how you incorporating into the political process.

Yeah.

And that has to do with education.

Yeah.

GOTV, getting out the vote efforts.

Right.

And again, you know, making voting easy and the conceptualization that we have in terms of a democratic system is we start with the races that, you know, everybody cheats.

And that is not the case in Texas.

There's no voter fraud.

Right.

Like, if you want voter fraud you know, look, in all the countries here, we do not have voter fraud.

That is going to be significantly, you know, impactful.

You have, you know, some instances, but that's it.

So the way that I see elections is, you know, a and I've said this before, it's a it's a market competition and you're choosing between two products.

Yeah.

Product A and product.

B Yeah.

So in order for you to do that, you just set example, right?

It's you buy on Amazon.

You don't go to Target.

Is that.

no, I have to drive.

I mean the thing is going to come here for one easy thing.

That's how the market economy works and we haven't transitioned that in terms of election.

It's a good point.

We make it more complicated and more complicated and more complicated.

Right.

And I will talk about that, too.

But I do think you're right that there is a kind of the characteristic of a voter.

Right.

So to me, voters who are going to be more frequently likely to turn out have four M's, that's money, mortgages, marriages and mortar boards, Right.

The flat hat that you wear when you graduate.

So if you've got better education, if you've got a mortgage.

Statistically, those people are more likely to vote.

People who are married and more likely to vote and people who have more money are more likely to vote.

And so if you look at this with respect to the two biggest groups that don't turn out in big numbers in Texas, it's the Latinos and the younger voters, sometimes both, right, like you said.

So the educational attainment for Latinos is a lot lower than it is for other age groups.

Home ownership is a lot lower than it is among Latinos than for other age groups.

Obviously, like I said, they're younger.

So that's going to shift that dynamic in a way that makes it hard for them to be able to, you know, make it work, right, which other people do.

And so I think that's one dynamic that can be change and will change, right?

I mean, as the state grows, it has to have a competent workforce.

You've talked a lot about this.

And so I think that's the kind of thing that is something that can change.

But it does take time.

And as we've seen, it's really, really a slow process.

So civic education is one of those things too, and we should definitely get into that because obviously it's critically important.

But the other thing, like we said, is that every state has barriers to voting and it depends on where you are and with respect to how much it affects a person's probability of turning out.

A lot of states are moving in a direction where they're basically trying to harden the process so that they have fewer vote fraud cases.

And like you mentioned, it's a very kind of rare instance, right?

You're more likely to get struck by lightning and see fraud, but it does still happen.

And so what's happening is that as a discussion from a political point of view, it's being used as a way to be able to kind of limit kind of what people can do.

And maybe it's working, but maybe it's working too well.

Right?

Where are the people that are not turning out to vote?

So perhaps there are ways to calibrate this that make it better.

So, for instance, if you look at Senate Bill one in 2021 and you can sort of track this all the way back to 2017 and the 2019 sessions, also, we've seen a significant overhaul of voting laws in Texas.

So New voter ID requirements for mail voting.

Right.

Which we've seen to decline in the last election cycles.

We've also seen that mail ballots cannot be sent unsolicited so that, like a party can't just sort of send everybody who's eligible to vote by mail.

Yeah, a ballot or and look, county officials can't do that either, although parties do tend to do it.

So maybe there's a bit of a wiggle room there.

The bills have also banned 24 hour voting.

They've banned drive thru voting and they've allowed for the secretary of state's office to have kind of monthly voter checks to see kind of if they can purge people who aren't eligible to vote.

So that's a lot in a very short period that adds to a lot of other kind of restrictions their time built into the system.

Is it possible that these things are going to be changed in the next few cycles where people see how bad voter turnout is and then make a decision that maybe we should alter that?

I don't think so.

Right, Because, I mean, these laws certainly benefit certain constituents than others.

Right.

You're making, you know, the probability of plane or the probability of entering these, you know, free market.

Yeah.

More complicated, right?

It's becoming more and more burdensome.

So if it becomes more complicated, it's like, no.

And that is tied to something that we might talk about it later is you know, the cost that cause is, you know, we vote on Tuesdays.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's.

Good.

Why don't we.

Have an hour or let's have it a holiday, right.

That's something people have.

And that's what happens, you know, in other countries, either voting is, for example, in Argentina is mandatory, right?

You need to show that you participate.

Or they find.

You.

Right.

And you know, in Mexico, it takes on a Sunday right.

What do you have Those days are, you know, the probability that someone is working is is is lower.

So here is middle of the day.

Tuesday, you have hourly workers that, yes, you're entitled to that, but you're not going to get paid.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah.

So it's like for you go and vote and we get paid, you know, for two or 3 hours that those, you know, 45 bucks or 50 bucks that I'm going to forgo.

I mean that's a tank full of gas.

Yeah, it's a good point.

Yeah.

And that's a cost of voting, right?

Like literally a.

That's a cost.

Yeah.

And voters are sophisticated enough to say, Hell no.

Yeah, I can't do that.

No, it's a great point.

And I want to talk about kind of solutions.

Right.

So we've talked a lot about the problems and barriers and we know Texas falls pretty high on the list of states with barriers.

And people have done studies that look at how hard it is to vote across the country.

And Texas is always in the top five.

So this is definitely something that's a problem.

But what's true also is that there are a lot of just clever ways that political scientist have discovered that you can do to juice up turnout.

Right?

Right.

A lot of them really small, almost costless.

And if we had some political will to do it, then I think you could really make a sizable difference because of just the sheer magnitude of voter.

So I think we need a new deal for voting in this country.

We really have to invest ourselves in getting people to turn out to vote.

So that means just a panoply of different things to do.

So having Election Day off is a great one.

Getting more money to local officials who administer elections is another.

We've seen over the last few years the hollowing out of the elected officials at the local level.

They're leaving their jobs for all kinds of reasons.

We know from one of our colleagues that has done surveys of these local election administrators, and they're scared, they're unhappy, they're stressed, they're worried, and they quit.

And as a result, then you don't have a kind of, you know, kind of firm basis and that kind of, you know, that kind of longevity you need in those jobs to be able to make that happen.

So money to them, right.

Like what happened after the 2000 election.

Right.

You saw a lot of money poured into election administration because they're like, we don't want to have this be the reason that our elections are seen to be inadequate.

Right.

Or that there's really some kind of a problem that then jeopardizes the outcome.

So more money and that's critical.

Right?

So spending a lot of money on that, I think these things are good.

I also put down here, I want to ask you about this treat election information like a silver alert.

You know, you're driving down the highway and it has the big signs.

yeah.

Silver alert.

You know, we're looking for this car and this place.

Let's get people, you know, informed about voting, right?

So like we said earlier, a lot of people don't vote because they don't know that they're supposed to vote.

Right.

So how about that?

Right.

Just more effort and a real fundamental push to get people to understand how important it is and then get them to turn out to vote.

So go.

Well, I mean, yes, absolutely.

But one of the thing is that, you know, election administration and running elections and decent has become over partizan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that polarization is hurting.

You know, the funding is hurting.

You know, how, you know, electorate administrators question about their integrity so on an so forth So you have, you know, just kicking the horse right in such a way that it's like, wait, I mean the horse is pulling the card we can not kill the horse, right?

Because once you enter in that rabbit hole is extremely complicated to get out.

And, you know, we have seen in many, many, many, many other Western democracies where things have gone south.

Yeah, pretty bad.

Yeah.

So the other important point is, again, voting and elections in my mind should be a national holiday.

Interesting.

Yeah, 100% national holiday.

And it would be, you know, the party of democracy.

I like it, right?

Yeah.

Like we have, like, cougars, I mean, and barbecues.

Why don't we go vote?

I love it.

I think that's great.

You know, in the in the country, we do a kind of patchwork effect, right?

Literally by county is how we administer elections.

Right?

That's such a micro level.

And even if you look at how we physically vote the machines, we vote on, that changes a lot by county and by state.

So there's so much variation that maybe it does recall for this national strategy.

I think this is something we can we can work with.

Let me ask you about this.

So a lot of political science work that's experimentally done tries to see how we can induce people to get to come vote.

And one of the things people find is that if you do two things, if you shame them or if you thank them for voting right, I'm okay either way, as long as they come out to vote.

Right.

But basically, like experimentally, you send people reminders.

Right, right, right.

You know, thanks for voting last time.

Please do it again.

Or we say, Hey, guess what?

All your neighbors have voted.

Yeah, you should vote too.

So it would take, you know, a few million dollars given to the Texas secretary of state and they could administer this program, which would then juice up turnout, I think, by a lot.

So that's an option.

I think that's kind of a low cost, you know, nonpartisan way to do this, reminding people that their ballots are safe.

That's another thing that increases turnout.

And, yes, something useful talking to people in their language is also critical.

Right?

We're talking about Latino turnout.

Earlier, political science scholars have found that Spanish language messages in a variety of mediums have been successful at increasing turnout among people.

And so that's useful.

I think also, we've done our own work on this and texting, right.

And found that there's some success.

So that's something that is possible.

These are all small changes that can make a huge difference if you kind of magnify a times the entirety of the state.

Yeah, but once again, you are entering to this question about, you know, do we really like competitive markets, Right?

Yeah.

And it's like if you ask, you know, Amazon, do you really like competitive markets?

And they say, yeah, we like competitive markets, but at the very end he's like, hell no, You know.

We don't want you here.

Yeah, we don't want you here.

Win one competition, right?

Yeah.

And in politics, he's the same thing.

And you know, Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same, right, in terms of, you know, fending of the competition.

Right.

But not really having that discussion because at the end is about the policy outcomes.

Right.

And how you're buying that particular voting, that particular product that is going to have an impact on your needs, your ones, your preferences.

Yeah.

So it's it's a matter of yes, having them been educated.

But, you know, I make let me ask you this question.

Right.

When you're going to purchase a vehicle.

Right.

You do a lot of research.

Yeah.

You're motivated to do it because you see a benefit.

And that benefit is, you know, you like your truck or, you know, you.

Get a better outcome.

For whatever, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So at the end you're going to make a choice and say, Well, I want this car or whatever, right.

Why we don't have that in voting.

Yeah, right people.

I mean it's lack of information is anything like that.

But, but it's you do the research for the car.

Yeah.

Why are you not doing the research for the car.

Is it civic education, Is it lack of interest.

A great point.

Is it that perhaps this is just a crazy idea that, you know, both the political system is not responsive to the voters needs ones and preferences?

Yeah.

And at the end you say it like, why bother?

I mean, they're not going to pay attention to me.

Yeah, I'm not going to do it.

Yeah.

Political advocacy is very low in Texas because they believe that sort of their vote doesn't matter and that's contributing to the kind of low turnout that makes sense because some elections aren't that competitive, especially at the state level.

So you don't see people turn out.

But I do think civic education can have a big impact here.

In fact, scholarship shows that if you teach people empathy and empowerment, then that does have an effect of getting them more engaged in the process.

And if they understand that process better, then they're going to be more likely to try to vote so we can revamp how we teach civics in this country.

I think that's something that there's enough of a road map here to allow that to happen.

But it does require that kind of effort.

Right.

People really have to want to make that change.

And that's hard, right, Because you're talking about a lot of kind of faith that that's going to work when you redo all these things.

And do you think that given our current political yeah, Uber Partizan climate is going to.

Work, it's really hard.

Yeah.

And you know, this requires sort of so much coaching that people have to see through this partizan divide.

I have faith that the next generation will see through some of these issues and it won't be as big of a problem, but it is going to take time and it is going to take that education.

So it will happen.

If we have those models right.

Look at the League of Women Voters.

I mean they put out a great guide.

Yeah.

Is zero partizan, right.

Like non partizan whatsoever they just give you the information is like yeah, here you get.

A candidate be like here's what they say, you take a choice.

You choose.

Those are great guides and actually a lot of media organizations do similar stuff and so it's useful.

But one problem is that you can't always taken to the polling place with you can't take your phone out in the polling place.

So that's a law maybe that needs to be tweaked, right?

Like let people just access information like, no, I understand that we have to prevent them from cheating and various ways, but like they still need to access the information.

So I literally have to handwrite the stuff because.

We have to have all of.

The yeah, we have all these judges we have to vote for.

Right?

And I can't remember all the names, every person and what, you know, exact, you know, Court It was and what number it was are so many.

So yeah, the length of the ballots is another problem, right?

Yeah, that's great.

No, in the loss of straight ticket voting.

Right.

Which the state took away a couple of years ago now means that basically you've got fewer people who are kind of motivated by Partizanship can go and sort of just say let's vote for the straight ticket, write one party and then leave it be.

Right now you have to vote all the way down the ballot or not.

And frankly, most people don't vote all the time on the ballot because there's just so much going on.

So I think that's an issue.

But I want to ask you about one last thing before we go.

This is something I get asked a lot, and that's ranked choice voting.

This is a.

Kind of.

It's an experiment that some municipalities have been working on.

It's basically instant runoff voting.

So it works in the following.

Basically, voters have to rank their candidates on the ballot in order of preference.

Right?

So A-B-C, you vote one, two, three or four, three, two, one, whatever your preferences are.

Right.

And then what happens is mathematically, they're able to kind of stimulate sort of who gets the most first place votes, second place votes.

And so sometimes that might be the case that some people really like the first person a lot.

They vote for that person.

And sometimes, you know, the second person gets more votes because they're getting more second choice votes, Right?

Because partizanship means you're going to vote for this party first.

In this party last year, people are voting for this party versus party last time.

The second choice is the first choice, right.

What do you think about this as a solution to some of the partizanship that is structurally built into our kind of winner take all system?

Well, I think it's very interesting, right.

And I think that, you know, there especially given that we have a two effectively a two party system, I think it's very interesting because it allows you to bold strategically in terms of different preferences and in terms of different candidates that might be from same can party or whatnot, but allows you to have a you know, to order your own preferences in a way that you could see that the political system is working for you.

So I'm all about for for that particular aspect, and we see it in all the aspects of our lives, right?

You go to a restaurant and then you rank choices.

You're thinking he's like, I want chicken.

we don't we don't have chicken, but, you know, we want fish or whatever.

You second choice and suddenly you end up eating pasta, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But that's fine.

And you're happy with it.

Yeah, but, you know, it's it's I think it's something that would allow us to increase turnout.

And in what?

In that note, I think that if you are able to go and register, go on register and go vote.

But for these week, just vote.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

The conversation keeps up next week and.