Interview: Early California voter turnout slow ahead of June 7 primary election

More than 21 million ballots were mailed to registered California voters last month, and as of Thursday morning, only roughly 10% of ballots have been returned. 

That number comes from Politica Data, Inc, which tracke voter turnout across the state. Political Data Vice President Paul Mitchell said that despite voting being easier than ever, it’s difficult to motivate people to vote.

"What I think this 10% means is you can't really overcome an election that just isn't as interesting to voters," Mitchell said. "At this point in the gubernatorial recall election just last year, we were at 7 million votes already … and right now we're at 2.1 million."

CapRadio’s Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez spoke with Mitchell to find out what low voter turnout means for this primary election.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Interview Highlights

On how the voter turnout numbers are looking so far

We’ve done a lot of things to actually make voting easier … you don’t even need a stamp to return the ballots anymore.

We have record voter registration. We’ve made it easier to register. We’ve made it easier to update your voter registration whenever you move. So all these things we’ve done to try to facilitate the voting process. 

But what I think this 10% means is you can’t really overcome an election that just isn’t as interesting to voters. At this point in the gubernatorial recall election just last year, we were at 7 million votes already had been cast, and right now, we’re at 2.1 million. So really, it’s one of those issues … you can have free parking at the arena and low-cost tickets, but if the game isn’t interesting, people won’t show up.

On how this voting year stacks up to previous years

What’s interesting is your midterm gubernatorial election cycles, the primaries are always historically the lowest type of statewide election.

We can look back at 2018, which was 37% turnout, 2014, which was 25% turnout. The primaries in gubernatorial elections are generally the lowest turnout.

Now, the catch is that we have more votes being cast right now than we had in 2014 when we only had 4.7 million people cast ballots. And we’re likely to have maybe as many ballots cast as in 2018. But we just have so many more voters [now]. 

In 2014, there are only 17 million voters. Now have 22 million voters, and so the share of the electorate that’s participating is going to look lower, even though the raw numbers of people who return ballots will be higher than 2014 and potentially reach 2018 levels.

On how early voting breaks down among party lines

Decades ago, when early voting was really starting more regularly, the vote-by-mail universe was heavily, heavily Republican. It was a lot more suburban, white. And so, as we saw early returns come in, they always skewed very, very Republican in those first ballots. 

That changed in 2020, in the general election, when the Trump campaign and messengers on right-wing radio and Fox News were saying, “oh, you can’t trust vote-by-mail,” all these conspiracy theories.

So things changed in that election. It seems as though a lot of that still continues where Republicans now have less faith that their ballot will be counted if they mail it in. They are more likely, they say, to vote at the polls. So the early vote, which used to skew more Republican, now skews more Democratic. 

What’s interesting is in the underlying demographics, it’s still much whiter. 0% of the early ballots came from voters who are white, only 15% from Latinos who are 40% of the state’s population and 27% of registered voters.

Seniors are less than a quarter of the ballots that were mailed out and they’re more than half of the ballots that have been returned. So we see an electorate in these early votes that is much more old, suburban, white and not reflective of the state’s true population.

On which counties have higher vote-by-mail turnout

Traditionally, the Bay Area turns out in higher numbers than Southern California, especially Los Angeles. In LA, they haven’t had the same historic vote-by-mail patterns … You have a lot more voters who haven’t voted by mail as frequently and don’t have those same habits. 

… Part of that is demographics. You have younger Latinos, more renters in those areas than you might in Santa Clara County, in San Mateo or the Bay Area as a whole … It’s not just a coincidence that a lot of our statewide elected officials from the Bay Area, and that Southern California, LA candidates specifically have had more of a struggle.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that, especially in these primaries, these gubernatorial preliminaries, where we elect statewide elected offices, that the Bay Area has its inherent advantage that gets played out when we look at that turnout.