Meg Whitman badly bungled her handling of her voting record — by not addressing it at the beginning of her campaign and by putting out inaccurate information about her registration history.
But it’s not at all clear that the facts of the record – she was a non-voter before the age of 46, and a fairly low propensity voter after that – will hurt her very much. As a low propensity voter, Whitman isn’t an outlier. She’s very much in the California mainstream.
I live in Los Angeles, where more than 80 percent of registered voters regularly fail to turn out in local elections. The state legislators with whom a Gov. Whitman would be negotiating are often elected with support of 10 percent of adults eligible to vote – or less.
According to figures compiled by scholars at George Washington University, well less than half of Californians eligible to vote actually cast ballots in many elections. In the 2006 general election for example, the so-called VEP rate –the number of ballots counted divided by the total number of people who are eligible to vote in California – was 41.2 percent. In other words, 59 percent of Californians eligible to vote didn’t cast ballots – either because they didn’t bother or because they weren’t registered.
While it would be more than a little bit shameless, Whitman could make a virtue of her poor record by pitching herself as a representative of the non-voting masses. Heck, if she could somehow win the votes of people who have voting records similar to hers, she would command a huge majority.