Blacks Repeated Low Voter Turnout Pattern

Last year, when the 29% voter turnout in Southeast San Diego was the lowest in the city, embarrassed black leaders pledged to take steps to insure that that dismal performance in the November, 1986, general election would not recur.

“That 29% was so abominable, so unforgivable,” the Rev. George Walker Smith, a widely respected minister and prominent political activist, said at the time. “That’s a disgrace that will not be repeated . . . I don’t want to see a 29% turnout in this community ever again.”

This month’s local elections validated Smith’s prophecy, though not in the way that he and other community leaders had hoped.

Final, unofficial returns from the Nov. 3 election show that the turnout in Southeast San Diego was only 25.5%, even lower than last year’s figure and substantially below the 36.7% citywide turnout.

Moreover, the 25.5% turnout is all the more disappointing to black leaders because the ballot featured two contests that, in theory, should have galvanized black voters: the first “open” seat election in the 4th City Council District in nearly two decades, and the emotional initiative over whether to change the name of Martin Luther King Way back to Market Street.

“When you look at what was at stake, black people should have turned out in greater numbers than anyone else in the city,” Smith said. “With the Martin Luther King Way thing, black turnout should have been 80% to 90% for that alone. That’s not unrealistic, and if anyone says it is, I’d say they’re just looking for ways to excuse pure laziness. This shows a complete apathy and complacency that this community should be ashamed of.”

While other black leaders share Smith’s distress, they admit that, despite the high-profile races of particular interest to the black community, the 25.5% turnout is not terribly surprising in light of the longstanding history of low voter turnout in San Diego’s predominantly black neighborhoods.

“What happened was very puzzling, but looked at in a larger context, it’s understandable,” college instructor Carroll Waymon said. “In Southeast San Diego, as in all minority communities, turnout historically is low. That’s a given. So, deplorable as it is, a 26% turnout--even in an election like this--is just a continuation of a very long pattern.”

Turnout of 23.2%

The turnout on the Martin Luther King Way initiative itself was only 23.2% in Southeast San Diego, 2.3 percentage points less than the community’s overall turnout--a discrepancy attributable to so-called “ballot dropoff,” a virtually universal voting behavior pattern in which more people vote in races listed at the top of a ballot than in those contests lower on the ballot. Similarly, the citywide turnout on the King initiative was 34.9%, 1.8 percentage points below the city’s overall 36.7% turnout.

Explanations abound among black leaders and others as to why the turnout on Nov. 3 was not higher in Southeast San Diego, where voters might have been expected to flock to the polls out of higher-than-normal self-interest.

The reasons offered range from general historical factors--such as voters’ disaffection with the political process--to specific features of the past campaign, including some second-guessing of the unsuccessful strategy employed by opponents of Proposition F, the street name-change initiative.

“Poor people generally don’t vote, regardless of what’s on the ballot,” said Vernon Sukumu, executive director of the Black Federation. “When you wake up in the morning and there’s only a bottle of water and a light in your refrigerator, voting’s not the most important thing on your mind.”

Lack of Faith Cited

Herb Cawthorne, president of the San Diego chapter of the Urban League, attributed the low turnout in part to blacks’ lack of faith in the electoral process.

“(In regard to) voting rights, among any poor people, there is the right and then there is the belief,” Cawthorne said. “Something like this vote makes it harder because black people don’t believe in the political process.”

The relatively low-key campaign waged by those who sought to retain the name Martin Luther King Way--a strategy used in an attempt to avoid racial polarization--also may have contributed to the low turnout, several black officials suggested.

“The campaign wasn’t run with the kind of fervor and the kind of fire that pulls people out to vote,” Sukumu said. “I’d have inflamed it more on both sides. Of course, if you had done that, maybe the margin of defeat just would have been wider.”

In addition, opponents of Proposition F focused their efforts on the vote-rich northern half of the city, spending little time or money on plans to increase the turnout in black and other minority communities where support for retention of the name Martin Luther King Way logically was strongest.

“It’s not that we took the black vote or any vote for granted, but we knew that this race was going to be won or lost north of I-8,” said Michel Anderson, co-chairman of the Committee to Keep Martin Luther King Way. The group raised only about $25,000, most of which was spent on signs in northern San Diego communities, Anderson said.

“It’s disappointing that we didn’t get a better turnout south of I-8, but we just didn’t have the money to do any targeting or get-out-the-vote work there,” Anderson added. “And even if we got every single vote there, it wouldn’t have been enough.”

The unofficial vote results show, however, that the King Way proponents did not even come close to tapping the full vote potential of Southeast San Diego. While citywide voters opted to reinstate the name Market Street by a 60%-40% margin, Southeast San Diego voters overwhelmingly supported retention of the slain civil rights leader’s name, 69.4% to 30.6%. Combined with the low turnout in Southeast San Diego, that means that thousands of likely anti-Proposition F voters never made it to the polls.

Laziness Blamed

“It may not have changed the outcome, but there could have been a lot more votes for King Way,” Smith said. “But I don’t blame those who ran the campaign for that. I blame the people who were too lazy to get out and vote. Complacency can enslave a people. Freedom comes through the voting process. If people don’t even bother to vote, they have no right to complain about what happens.”

Most black officials interviewed said that they do not interpret the low Southeast San Diego turnout as evidence that the Martin Luther King Way issue was perhaps more important to community leaders than to average citizens.

“I don’t think you can make that assumption just because of the low turnout,” Waymon said. “The strong support for keeping Martin Luther King Way among those who did vote in Southeast shows that it was important to the average person. In general, people didn’t vote for the same reasons that they didn’t vote in the past.”

In the wake of last year’s low voter turnout, Smith, Waymon and a handful of other politically prominent blacks began planning a new organization--originally named the Southeast Coordinating Council--aimed at dramatically increasing political activity in Southeast San Diego. Nearly a year later, that organization, now called the Black Network Alliance, is still in its formative stages, but its organizers hope that it will be fully operational, with a small paid staff and office, by early next year.

Political Clearinghouse

Envisioned as a political clearinghouse for the activities of diverse groups within the black community, including churches, social agencies, professional organizations and others, the Alliance is intended to help the black community present a more unified political front than it has now. Its potential agenda could range from coordinating year-round voter registration drives and political education programs to serving as a forum on issues such as drug problems and high unemployment in minority communities.

“It’s a way to keep the community’s people and resources moving in the same direction at the same time,” Waymon explained.

Although most concur with the group’s purposes, Smith and others questioned whether the organization will succeed in eradicating a longstanding problem that, as Smith put it, “seems to get talked about every year but never changes.”

“I’d like to see a lot less talking and a lot more work--that’s the only thing that’s going to turn this around,” Smith said. “It’s a real embarrassment to this community to have turnouts this low year after year. It’s inexcusable. Maybe it’s time to say we’re our own worst enemies. I’d like to think things will be better by the ’88 election. But, with things the way they are now, it would be naive to believe that.”

VOTER BREAKDOWN

Citywide Southeast November, 1986 49.3 29.0 November, 1987 36.7 25.5 Proposition F 34.9 23.2 Yes, change name to Market Street 60.0 30.6 No, leave name as Dr. M.L. King Jr. Way 40.0 69.4