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A Rejoinder to Piven and Cloward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Curtis B. Gans
Curtis B. Gans*
Affiliation:
Committee for the Study of the American Electorate
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Extract

The terms are not as Cloward and Piven have stated them, between one theory that holds that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote and another that holds that registered voters are going to the polls less and less, but rather whether registration barriers or lack of motivation is the primary cause of nonparticipation. It is also about the public policy implications of that debate—whether one engages in a unitary attack on registration barriers or a multi-faceted approach to nonparticipation, which includes but is not limited to barrier removal.

In the inexact world of voting statistics nothing will be fully solved without a full-validation study of Census-reported registration and voting figures, and state aggregate data on registration.

There are three issues involved: whether the state official registration rolls are inflated; to what degree; and whether they are progressively inflated. On the first there is broad agreement, which includes myself and the disclaimer I issue in each of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate's reports on registration and turnout.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 175 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. See Piven, Francis Fox and Cloward, Richard A., “Government Statistics and Conflicting Explanations of Non-Voting, PS, Vol. XXII, No. 3, September 1989, p. 595.Google Scholar Piven and Cloward seem to base their high estimates of deadwood in official registrants on two states, Michigan and Mississippi. In the Michigan case, they posit that because Michigan fails to purge nonvoters unless they have failed to vote for 10 years, they have a reported 89% official registration figure, which is a 24% inflation over the reported registration figures of the Current Population Survey. Since Michigan has maintained a constant methodology of cleaning their registration lists, which is not limited to purging for nonvoting, it is hard to posit progressive inflation. And the apparent high level of official registration may have another cause. Michigan was the first state to introduce driver's license registration in 1975. In Colorado, in 1988, after instituting driver's license registration between 1984 and 1988 and thus for only one election, registration climbed to 81.5% of eligibles, not too far from Michigan which has been using this system for 14 years. According to Christopher Thomas, the state's director of elections, in the last year Michigan has changed its purge of nonvoters from those who had been on the rolls for ten years to those who had been on the rolls for five, and they found no significant additional reduction of names from the registration lists.

Mississippi's figures were grossly inflated, but because of more stringent purging procedures adopted between 1984 and 1988 their official registration figures have declined by more than seven percentage points.

2. See Geographical Mobility, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, Nos. 353, 368, 377, 384, 430, among others in series. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Washington, DC. It should be noted that the last report numbered 430 and covering the period between 1986–87 showed a rise in mobility from rates averaging in the low and mid-teens to 20%, which, if continued, would have some bearing on registration figures. On the other hand, since nearly 60% of mobility occurs within the same county and 75% within the same state, the effect on actual registration figures is likely to be small.

3. See Demographic and Socioeconomic Aspects of Aging in the United States, Series P-23, Current Population Reports, U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, published annually.

4. The Congressional Research Service submitted to the House Task Force on Elections for its June 27, 1984, hearing two separate tables. Both were based on the nine states that were then thought to have the most thorough purging procedures and the cleanest lists. One table presented the official registration figures of those states and the total vote for highest office in 1980. The second presented an adjusted registration figure that removed, based on average mobility rates, all those who had moved outside the county and outside the state. By the first figure the turnout of registered was 78.1%; by the second the turnout was 83.8%. Since a state with thorough registration-cleaning procedures would be likely to address the problem of movers, but would not be likely to get all of them, the estimate of 81–82% was an average weighted toward getting fewer rather than more.

5. See Piven and Cloward, op. cit., pp. 583–584. The reason these jurisdictions were used is that they have changed their list-cleaning processes to incorporate the new National Change of Address system of the Post Office. This system, which involves a computer match between the registration lists and the changes of address on the computer files, eliminates the two major errors in a mail verification system—mail that goes to an address and is not returned by a new addressee at that address and non-delivered, non-forwardable mail. It thus provides a tighter screen for the registration lists. In January of this year, Sacramento County conducted a computer match with its entire list and had to remove only 4.7% of its names. (It also had to update 5.6% of its list which had moved to other locations in the county, making 10% probably a high inflation figure for the state of the post-purge registration lists in that county.)

6. For differential between those who voted for president and those who went to the polls to cast ballots in the 29 states that count total ballots cast, see Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, Final Report on the 1988 Elections, available from CSAE, 421 New Jersey Avenue, S.E., Washington, DC 20003.

7. It should be noted that in one respect in certain individual states registration law may slightly affect the decline in turnout. In states that have tightened their purging laws to either increase the frequency by which they remove people for the rolls for non-voting and/or to reduce the threshold for removing the list (e.g., for not voting in two years from not voting in four), the obstacle of reregistration may serve, as some studies indicate, as a deterrent to continued participation. This would be offset nationally, to some extent, by an equal number of states that have loosened the threshold and frequency of their purges.

8. Douglas Gatlin, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida; paper delivered to conference entitled “Enhancing Voter Participation,” Ponte Vedra, Florida; February 10, 1989, sponsored by The Election Center, Washington, DC.

9. See Teixeira, Ruy, Why Americans Don't Vote, Greenwood Press, 1987.Google Scholar

10. See Rosenstone, Steven J. and Wolfinger, Raymond E., “The Effect of Registration Laws on Voter Turnout,” American Political Science Review, 72: 27–45.Google Scholar

11. See Creating the Opportunity. How Changes in Registration and Voting Law Can Enhance Voter Turnout, Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, Washington, DC, 1987.Google Scholar

12. See Mitchell, Glenn and Wlezien, Christopher, “Voter Registration Laws and Turnout.” Presented at Midwest Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 13–15, 1989.Google Scholar (Note: The Rosenstone and Wolfinger study was based on a regression analysis of a single year's Current Population Survey election report. Both the Committee study and the Mitchell-Wlezien paper were based on a longitudinal analysis of the effects of selected law changes over time. The difference between the latter two studies is that Mitchell-Wlezien posited an additive model—that the impact of each change in law could be added to the impact of other laws to produce a total increment in turnout substantially in excess of the impact of any given law. The Committee posited that, with the exception of the impact of the related issue of purging procedures on turnout, the maximum amount of positive change in turnout could be achieved by election day registration and the impact of all other less sweeping changes would not produce additional turnout enhancement beyond that which would be achieved by election day registration.)

13. See also Powell, G. Bingham Jr., Colloquoy in Freedom in the World Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1988–1989, by Gastil, Raymond D. (New York: Freedom House, 1989), p. 243ff.Google Scholar