D.D. 07/14/06

I voted and I have the sticker to prove it. I only had one beef with the ballot on the new electronic voting machines - the judicial candidate listings. Typically, these judicial races are at the end of the ballot, but I must have cycled through five screens of judges - voting "no" on most of them in protest of having to vote on them at all. Why are these "yes" and "no" votes even on the ballot? The history suggests they always come out approved - I can't think of a single case in history where they didn't turnout that way. So it would seem that these judges are put on the ballot just to give these keepers of justice the moral authority of having been approved by an 99.999% of the electorate.

The disgust of having to vote on a justice aside, I understand that these races are for judgeships considered a higher level of government than the county level - and it shouldn't be surprising that you would have to cast your vote on them before you got to the County government general elections. However, typically these are the races that the voters are most interested in, outside the sexy races like President and US Senate. County government officials are certainly the ones that have the most dealings with the immediate public. I would suspect that voters have a real desire to vote in these elections. However, the county races were placed after 5-6 screens worth of yes/no judge candidates.

As such, I suspect that voter turnout among the County elected officials will be depressed simply because of a natural phenomenon political scientists call voter fatigue. It happens when the user - typically someone who doesn't follow politics - is cycling through the ballot and gets tired of voting on stuff they consider pointless - and simply stop voting and cast there ballot then and there. This seemed to be a bit more difficult process given the electronic machine, because it is not until the end screen that an option appears to submit your ballot, but on the machines that I used, there was a big red button the right hand side of the machine that you pushed to confirm your vote. I suspect that you could press this button and finish voting at any step of the process, but I don't know for sure.

If that is the case, then there is a good chance some voters may not even get to the county races as a result of voter fatigue. I can only imagine what the voter fatigue will be in a place like Shelby County, where there are a record number of elections on the ballot. It will be interesting to look at turnout among different races following the end of this primary season to see the full implications of voter fatigue as it relates to the new electronic voting machines that the great majority of Tennessee counties now have under the Help America Vote Act.