For the past month, my mail-in ballot for the upcoming primary election has been collecting dust on my kitchen counter. Every day I pass by there. I've even put a pen on it, as a reminder to fill it out, to do my civic duty. But I haven't even been able to open the seal.
And I am not the only one.
Of California's roughly 22 million registered voters, only about 14% had returned their ballots as of Monday. Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., expects turnout to eventually reach 30%, ranking among the lowest in recent history.
He and other experts offer all kinds of explanations for why this happens. The main one is that very few people are excited about the idea of voting or don't feel the need to vote because there won't be much change either way.
In the primary elections to nominate candidates for president, for example, both the Democratic and Republican parties have practically decided who the winners are. Whether we like it or not, a geriatric rematch awaits us: Joe Biden against Donald Trump.
The Senate race to succeed Laphonza Butler, who was appointed to that position after the death of Dianne Feinstein, is another example. Although the race is shaping up to be one of the most expensive in California history, few voters seem to care because a Democrat will almost certainly win in November, leaving partisan control of the upper chamber unchanged.
Add to that the procrastination of your garden. Additionally, many voters are so busy working multiple jobs trying to make ends meet and raising their families that they may not even know that an election is taking place. It is not surprising that the percentage of returned votes is so insignificant.
But I suspect there's something else going on, too, and it could become a more frequent reason for voter apathy in the coming decades, assuming our democracy survives that long.
We used to hear: “Vote for whoever you think is the best candidate for office or who best represents your interests.”
Now it's about the massive gamification of elections.
More fantasy football than rooting for the local red or blue team. More chess than checkers. People are no longer thinking that voting is a simple act of civic duty. Instead, it is becoming a series of strategic decisions and complicated calculations made in a desperate attempt to elect a government of politicians who will actually improve our lives.
In practice, gamification looks like obsessively reading polls in an attempt to gain an advantage or dispel rumors about your party. Or “waste” your vote on the candidate you want to win, even if the polls say he won't win, because you want to send a message to the political establishment. Or, my favorite, vote for a candidate you don't like in a primary to help a candidate you like win the general election.
Of course, not all of this is new. For decades we have been told to “vote for the lesser of two evils.” The electoral process in this country has always been imperfect.
But now, with so many democratic ideals at stake in such an existential way and with razor-thin margins for many candidates running in a deeply divided and rigged country, gamification of elections suddenly seems necessary to get the results we want.
“There's a situation where a lot of regular voters are almost acting like the TV commentators they see on Fox News or cable,” Mitchell told me. “A lot of our news now is infotainment, and a lot of infotainment related to politics is like the game of sports. It's like post-game analysis of the election. And then people go into that post-game analysis mode when they think about the election.”
Just consider the plethora of third-party presidential candidates who could appear on ballots in some states, but certainly not all, in November. In particular, this election season, dishonest candidates could be used as especially powerful actors for gamification.
According to the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies Survey co-sponsored by The Times, Biden leads Trump by 18 points among California voters when the race is hand to hand. But when there are additional candidates in the mix (Cornel West, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Jill Stein, for example) that lead drops to 12 points. Polls in swing states have shown similar results.
Biden could lose the election if enough people are put off by the complicated calculations of gamification and choose to vote for a third-party candidate or simply stay home.
These people also exist. Many of them.
In recent months I have attended packed campaign rallies for West and Kennedy. I have met numerous supporters who have said they have heard all the warnings about using their votes to enable Trump's return, but they don't care. They don't want to play the game. They will choose a candidate they like, hoping to push our political system further left or right, or they will choose not to vote at all.
As a 30-year-old black woman told me in January, while waiting to meet West in a line so long it stretched to the door of a Leimert Park coffee shop: “I'm looking for something different and something that feels true. me. I am not linked to any particular party. I feel like I just need something that I feel like I can resonate with. And someone who truly sees me as an individual.”
If that candidate is not on your mail-in ballot, you won't bother filling it out.
Then there's the gamification we saw in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary two weeks ago.
Fed up with the Biden administration's policies toward the war and the resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza, more than 100,000 voters, many of them Muslims and Arab Americans, chose “unengaged” on their ballots. It was a protest vote, designed to pressure Biden to call for a permanent ceasefire, or lose crucial support in the Midwestern swing state.
Social media exploded with division over what all of this meant for the November election. Actual and self-proclaimed experts argued authoritatively that these voters had either sent a powerful message to Biden or accomplished nothing, depending on whether you choose to count the actual number of uncommitted votes or simply the percentage.
I will not intervene in the Rorschach test. But seeking to further gamify the system, activists are pushing for similar protest votes in other states, including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Washington. In Washington, at least, it appears to be gaining popularity, with one major union, the UFCW 3000, endorsing the non-committal tactic ahead of that state's March 12 primary election.
However, I will agree with Maxwell Stearns, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of “Parliamentary America: The Less Radical Means to Radically Repair Our Broken Democracy.” He frames what happened in Michigan as “a profound collapse” of our electoral process.
“What that really reveals is that there is a lack of meaningful options to register an intense position that is in opposition to the party that one naturally aligns with because of our two-party system,” he told me.
In fact, Stearns' book lays out a multi-step strategy for reforming our elections to make it easier to elect better candidates, without resorting to such gamification. And yet, one could argue that the well-intentioned reforms we've already seen, whether ranked-choice voting or open primaries, haven't helped much.
“These are things that worked very well in my graduate game theory course in college,” Mitchell said. “But in application, there is an opportunity cost that accompanies a change in the electoral system.”
That opportunity cost can be voter confusion or, in my case, anguish and avoidance.
Which reminds me of why my ballot is still unopened on my kitchen counter. It's about the Senate race.
If I had to vote for the candidate who best represents my interests, it would be Representative Barbara Lee of Oakland. But I also want an infusion of progressive politics in the Senate, and I worry that voting for Lee will undermine that.
In the primary, Republican Steve Garvey has the support of 27% of likely voters, followed by Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank with 25%, according to the UC Berkeley/Times poll. In addition to Lee, who has 8%, the other progressive candidate, Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, has 19%.
In a general election between the two leading candidates (and I don't even need a poll for this), Schiff would easily beat Garvey in largely Democratic California. But a race between Schiff and Porter would be much closer, with Porter likely dragging Schiff further to the left. And I should note that this is only happening because Schiff's campaign has gamified the election, pushing Garvey to increase turnout among Republican voters in the primary elections.
So, to gamify or not to gamify? I asked Mitchell what he should do.
“Vote for who you like in races where you know who you like,” he responded. “And if you don't know who you like in a race, skip it. Make your life easy. Enter your ballot.”
On Sunday night I received similar advice from a black woman who had driven from Long Beach to attend a pro-Lee rally in South Los Angeles: “Just have hope and vote.” He echoed Lee herself, who on Monday told voters not to be discouraged by the polls because that's the game.
I, for one, am tired of playing. I'm dusting off my ballot and voting for Lee.
