During Courage Campaign's recent conference call with Debra Bowen, the Secretary of State expressed interest in expanding the number of permanent absentee voters as a means to mitigate the expected lower turnout of our June statewide primary election next year.
There's a big concern with this Feb 5 primary that we're going to see a big drop off in June. I'd like to see the state undertake a real effort to get voters who want to do so to sign up as permanent absentee voters...permanent vote by mail voters. That will mean that they will automatically get ballots for the June and November elections once they register for the February primary. We know that that system increases turnout among occasional voters and among minority voters. Some counties promote that very heavily, others don't. It's very important in a year where we could have wildly swinging turnout because of having three elections, that we take advantage of those kinds of tools.
In last year's November election, according to Capitol Weekly, absentee ballots accounted for 45% of all votes cast throughout the state, a percentage that is expected to rise to 50% in 2008. If Secretary Bowen has her way, that number could be far higher.
So what does this mean for the February 2008 primary?
One of the arguments for moving the presidential primary up was to give California more leverage in demanding that the federal tax dollars we send to Washington come back to us in a more equitable manner. Russell Goldsmith breaks down the current situation California finds itself in over at HuffPo:
California gets shortchanged when federal tax dollars are at stake. In 2003, according to the non-partisan California Institute for Federal Policy research, Californians sent $50 billion more to Washington in federal taxes than the state received in federal expenditures. That means that for every dollar you paid to the Internal Revenue Service, only 79 cents found its way back to California in the form of federal programs and expenditures.
If I'm doing my math right, that means that the $50 billion we're getting shortchanged represents the remaining 21 cents on the dollar that we pay out. Imagine what even gaining 5 cents more on the dollar would mean...more than $10 billion a year that could go toward our schools, roads, prisons! As it is, a full 44 states get a better deal than we do including, no surprise, Texas, which gets a return of 92 cents to the dollar back.
