Democracy is messy, but usually not that messy.
Take New Hampshire, for example, where President Biden boycotted the primary last Tuesday after the state crossed the line in the Democratic Party’s new schedule to maintain its status as the nation’s premier primary. Because it would have been embarrassing if Mr. Biden had lost there, a group of supporters began telling voters that while he wouldn’t ask them for their vote, he didn’t not want them either. Could you please write on his behalf? (They did and he won.)
Next up on the main calendar is South Carolina on February 3rd, but only if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a Republican there, you won’t vote until February 24, after your party colleagues in Nevada have their say.
Oh, and as for Nevada: If you support Nikki Haley, you can vote for her in the state’s Feb. 6 primary, but your vote won’t count toward the Republican nomination. This is related to the party’s election meetings on February 8th and Ms. Haley will not take part in this process. If you support former President Donald J. Trump, you can vote for him in the caucuses, but not in the primaries. The primary elections, conducted by the state of Nevada, are conducted by mail, while the caucuses are held in person. That’s because the Nevada Republican Party opposed conducting primary elections by mail and therefore scheduled the primary election from the start.
Got it?
As voters enter an election year in which many feel democracy itself is on the ballot, they face a bewildering array of deadlines and procedures in selecting their presidential candidates. That’s without addressing the long-standing problem of some states scheduling separate primaries for president and other offices, as well as special elections, leaving some voters with up to five days of voting.
“This is all very confusing for us, even as voters,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, executive director of the League of Women Voters, which runs the voter information website Vote411.org.
A wealth of research suggests the quagmire could reduce participation.
“Anything that disrupts voter habits will reduce turnout,” said Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “Changes in location, day and format have a disruptive effect.”
And that disruption, said Alex Meadow, senior director of partnerships at Vote.org, could be most difficult to navigate for “voters new to the process,” reinforcing the tendency of primaries to tilt toward the most engaged and partisan voters focus. voters.
It also has the potential to stoke distrust in elections — and it already is doing that in Nevada.
The process there stalled when the Nevada Republican Party decided to hold its own caucuses — on a different night, with ID required, but without absentee or early voting and with the requirement that ballots be counted by hand. The party will appoint delegates to the Republican National Convention based solely on caucus results and will exclude candidates who place their names on the primary ballot from the caucuses.
So voters will have Mr. Trump as an option in the caucus but not in the primaries, and they will have Ms. Haley as an option in the primary but not in the caucuses. No matter how much support Ms. Haley receives in the primary, she will not be allocated delegates to the convention, and Mr. Trump’s supporters will receive primary election ballots in the mail without his name on them.
For weeks, the party has fielded questions on social media from voters confused about Mr. Trump’s absence or, worse, mistakenly believing it proves the election was rigged.
Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald accused the state’s election officials of failing to announce the party’s primaries on the primary ballot. But disinformation also seems to be at play.
Last week, in a video interview with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson, Kash Patel, a former anti-terrorism adviser to Mr. Trump, held up a ballot for the Nevada primary and declared, “They’re doing another election-rigging job,” complaining about the name of Mr. Trump was not on the ballot – despite the fact that Mr. Trump himself had decided not to put it there.
David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he doesn’t expect “a lot of turnout at all, which completely defeats the purpose of (a) having a party-building caucus and (b) being an early state.”
When confusion or unfounded anger prevents people from voting, it’s no longer just about the presidential candidates.
Research has shown that voting is a “habit,” meaning that people who have voted once are more likely to continue voting. The opposite is also true: if you miss an election, you risk losing the habit of voting. A confusing choice could have repercussions for years.
Political scientists have been warning about this for a long time. Researchers at Yale University and Tel Aviv University suggested two decades ago that holding many elections that are not viewed as important — something they call “typical of the United States” — can destroy voting habits because people become attached to them get used to skipping them. A 2016 study showed that voting habits remain strongest when elections are held using the same format.
“If you voted in November 2020, you are more likely to vote in November 2024. You’re not necessarily more likely to pick up habits that would apply to a quirky Saturday election during primary season,” Dr. Green, who was a co-author of both studies.
These patterns are not absolute. Some changes, such as the expansion of early voting and absentee voting, have attracted people who did not traditionally vote in person or were unable to cast their vote. And many voters are adapting, especially the committed voters who are likely to vote in primaries in the first place.
Enrijeta Shino, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama who studies voting behavior, said complications like those in this year’s primaries would likely have a larger impact if they occurred in a general election. Additionally, more people than usual have recently become interested in politics, and voter turnout increased in large numbers in 2020, even during the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Voters are extremely engaged right now,” Mr. Meadow said, “and that can prevent these kinds of changes and shifts from having the impact that they might have had in the past in a lower-intensity, lower-engagement environment.”
Still, this year’s competitions have brought warning signs.
In New Hampshire, while voter turnout in the Republican primary broke the state’s record, turnout in the unauthorized, Biden-less Democratic primary was lower than in the similarly uncompetitive Republican primary four years ago , but the main candidate on the list was voting.
Both Mr. Meadow of Vote.org and Ms. Solomón of the League of Women Voters and Vote411.org said their websites had seen more traffic this year. Ms. Solomón said her organization’s website received more than four times as many visitors in the first 10 days of 2024 as it did in the first 10 days of 2020 — most likely a sign of an electorate unusually hungry for clarity.
“People are coming proactively to look for information,” she said, but added: “We are concerned that there could be voter fatigue that could set in.”
Kellen Browning contributed reporting.
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2024-01-29 15:34:23
www.nytimes.com