GUIDING VOTERS
A different approach is to provide voters with more high-quality information, rather than trying to improve the quality of the messages that the candidates themselves produce. Returning to the epigraph from Samuel Popkin that opens this chapter, "If voters look for information about candidates under streetlights, then … the only way to improve elections is to add streetlights." If civic activists flnd attack ads distasteful, they can offer voters an alternative source of information about the candidates.
In Ohio, for example, voters did not have to rely on the attack ads exchanged by the two leading candidates in the 1998 gubernatorial election. Any voter who visited a public library, the Internet, or any number of coffee shops and public spaces could pick up a copy of the Ohio Voters Guide put out by the League of Women Voters. A quick glance at the fourth page showed voters the candidates' educational backgrounds, occupations, and relevant professional and voluntary experiences. The candidates also provided written answers to two questions, "How would you increase economic stability for all Ohioans?" and "Do you support a permanent, stable funding source for the House Trust Fund? Why or why not?"
Many voters flnd publications like the Ohio Voters Guide useful. A study of a similar voting guide in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, found that as many as a third of the registered voters in the county at least glanced at the guide before voting.[36] For many voters, a League of Women Voters guide is the only readily available source of information in low-intensity elections, such as those for state legislature or district judge. Poll workers often see voters walk into the voting booth clutching a printed guide, and those voters may read as they vote or refer back to selections they have already marked in their guides.[37]
Though voting guides can be helpful, they often contain vague or distorted information. The Ohio questions mentioned above illustrate two
For this and other reasons, the state of California prints and distributes an official voting guide with state funds. Once candidates submit their statements to the editors of the California Voters Guide, opponents can challenge the statements, and state judges rule on whether those challenges reveal factual inaccuracies. Despite public mistrust of government, the California secretary of state's office has found that the state-sponsored Guide has considerable influence on California voters. All of them receive it, and as many as one-third read and use it.[38] Writing from personal experience, I recall walking door-to-door during one election in San Diego and receiving a puzzled response from a voter when I tried to give her information about a congressional candidate. "Why would I need this?" the voter asked. "I'll just read the Voters Guide." (The irony is that congressional races are not, in fact, in the state's Guide.)
No matter what the quality of a guide's questions and answers, printing costs create space limitations that prevent detailed portraits of all of the candidates running for public office in a major election. On the Internet, no comparable limits exist. Project Vote Smart, the Democracy Network, and many other organizations have produced elaborate websites with several pages of information (and links to other sources of information) on each election. Some of these on-line voting guides permit interactive candidate evaluation: voters can answer a series of questions and compare their responses to candidate answers, just as Erdman and Susskind describe in their vision of universal representation (presented earlier in this chapter). These on-line guides can even provide up-to-the-minute information, including adwatch-style critiques of candidate claims and daily campaign flnancing updates to reveal any untoward contributions that happen to arrive just before election day.[39]
Though only a relatively small percentage of voters currently use these on-line guides, as Internet use increases among the general population, they will probably come to play at least as important a role as their paper-and-ink forerunners. These guides will also become more
Finally, some newspapers have begun to change the basic framing— or "master narrative"—of their state and local campaign coverage by deemphasizing attacks and counterattacks and focusing on the real concerns of their readership. As the journalism scholar Jay Rosen explains in the case of the 1992 election coverage provided by the Charlotte Observer, the newspaper "succeeded in changing the master narrative from the story of how the campaign was won to a new story: the story of citizens voicing their concerns, and listening to what candidates said about them." Stories report on the experiences and aspirations of local communities, then connect local issues to the candidates running for public office. Other papers followed the example of the Observer, Rosen explains, because "everyone in journalism is tired of the horse race as a master narrative.[40]
What is different about this form of campaign reform is that it addresses the most fundamental requirement for effective electoral rejection—the development of voters' policy views. Attempts to regulate campaign discourse or provide more information on the candidates take for granted that the voters already know what they want from their elected representatives. Chapter 3 demonstrates that, in fact, most voters do not understand government and politics very well and often fail to link their underlying values to even general policy preferences. By talking with voters and reporting those conversations in their newspapers, journalists simulate the face-to-face deliberation that helps citizens develop and recognize their interests. In this way, a newspaper can help its readers by both arriving at evaluative criteria and applying those criteria systematically to candidates.
Were all voters newspaper readers and all newspapers supportive of this innovative form of public journalism, American elections might produce different results. Unfortunately, neither of those preconditions exists, nor are they likely to. Newspapers are businesses, and if those businesses decide that such coverage boosts advertising revenue through an expanded affiuent readership, then papers might change their coverage. There is no strong evidence to that effect, but it is not an inconceivable evolution.
The more fundamental problem is that newspaper readers are already and will always be the most informed and sophisticated voters.[41] Other voting guides, whether printed or on the Internet, have the same drawback. A study of the California voting guide, for instance, found that 92 percent of users were regular voters even in primary elections. The majority of users had a bachelor's degree, with 28 percent of all users having obtained a graduate degree. This is not to say that such a guide has no beneflt: over two-thirds of the users surveyed found the voting guide "very helpful."[42] The problem is that conventional voting guides and innovative newspaper coverage of elections do not reach the average citizen. Ironically, these rich sources of political information reach the voters who need them the least.