8.9 Percent Voter Turnout in One of America’s “Smartest” Cities Linked to Lack of Quality Local Reporting
The City of Ann Arbor web site has a page titled “Recognitions.” In 2010, among the recognitions Ann Arbor received:
2010:
Taste Contest Award (Ann Arbor Water Treatment Plant) – American Water Works Association, Michigan Section, 2010
America’s Top 50 Bike-friendly Cities (No. 14) – Bicycling Magazine, 2010 list
2010 Pillar Award for Outstanding Government Agency (Ann Arbor Building Services Unit) — Builders & Remodelers Association of Greater Ann Arbor
America’s Most Livable Cities (No. 4) – Forbes Magazine, 2010 list
Top College Sports Towns (No. 1) – Forbes Magazine, 2010 list
Top 10 Cities to Raise a Family – Kiplinger.com, 2010 list
America’s Top 25 Most Educated Cities (No. 2) – Portfolio.com, 2010 list
One kudo Ann Arbor did not win in 2010 was a place on the Men’s Health Magazine list of 100 most Star Spangled cities. In those cities, residents vote. United States cities that boast high voter turn out include Portland, Oregon, Kansas City, Missouri, Seattle, Hartford, Connecticut, Minneapolis, and Madison. Not only did Ann Arbor not make the top 10 list of Star Spangled cities, Ann Arbor didn’t even make the top 100. Toledo, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan and Yonkers, New York have higher voter turnout rates than does Ann Arbor—and all appear in the list of the top 100 cities where a large percentage of registered voters go to the polls regularly.
So why don’t Ann Arbor’s registered voters turn out?
On August 14, 2011 AnnArbor.com posted an editorial that asks its readers to vote in a poll about why they didn’t vote in the August primary election. The Booth Newspaper media kit claims AA.com hosts 111,000 readers per day. As of today, 340 readers cast votes in the poll. Thus, the AnnArbor.com editorial in which Dearing writes, “If you live in Ann Arbor and you don’t vote in city elections, we’re asking you to tell us why not. You can do so online by responding to the poll that you’ll find at annarbor.com/polls” rustled up a voter turnout rate of .003 percent from people sitting in front of their computers, one mouse click away from participation. AA.com Kontent King Tony Dearing even goes on to implore, “The city runs elections and most residents stay home. Nothing improves democracy like an educated and involved citizenship. Ann Arbor is more than capable of that, but it isn’t happening. Tell us why not. We’re listening.”
Only .0015 percent of the 222,000 readers who (allegedly) visited the site on Sunday and Monday day voted in the poll.
That’s a voter turnout rate that is exponentially more abysmal than the 8.9 percent of Ann Arbor voters who cast ballots in the August primary election. It does not, however, answer the important question of why did 91 percent of Ann Arbor’s 90,000-100,000 registered voters sat out the August primary. Here’s a hint: look at the Star Spangled cities list of cities Ann Arbor politicos and city staffers like to compare to Ann Arbor, and match the Pulitzer-winning paper to the city it serves (most of the cities on the list have multiple newspapers that have won awards for investigative journalism):
The Oregonian
The Seattle Times
The Kansas City Star
The Hartford Current
The Wisconsin Journal Sentinal
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
The Detroit Free Press
The New York Times
The Ann Arbor News nominated one-time writer Susan Oppat for a Pulitzer, but the paper never won the coveted prize. AnnArbor.com writers have won Associated Press awards. Those prizes are handed out to papers that belong to the Associated Press willing to pay the $75 entry fee. It’s a closed competition, in other words, unlike the Pulitzer competition that is open to any media outlet that meets the competition criteria. (In 2011, the first Pulitzer was given out to an online news site for reporting.)
Among some who have run for office, the Ann Arbor Observer has earned a reputation as being incapable of credibly profiling candidates, and producing candidate features that focus on the campaign issues. The monthly paper steers clear of subjects critical of City Hall. According to the City’s check register, available online, in 2010, the city of Ann Arbor dropped over $120,000 advertising in the pages of the freely-distributed Ann Arbor Observer.
Likewise, according to a recent piece posted by the Publisher, AnnArborChronicle.com gets only 15 percent of its revenue from reader subscriptions. Between July and September 2011, according to the site, AAChronicle.com pulled in the bulk of its online ads from the City of Ann Arbor, city departments, county government, and businesses run by locals who actively donate to and support those currently in local office. AnnArborChronicle.com has not (until recently) done any first hand reporting. The site has never done any investigative reporting.
What do AnnArbor.com, the Ann Arbor Observer and AnnArborChronicle.com have to do with the fact that only 8.9 percent of the city’s registered voters turned out in August?
A lot, it turns out.
A book titled Just How Stupid Are We? puts what media like to think is the recent sorry state of the American electorate into some pretty hysterical historical perspective. The book’s Amazon.com blurb says it best: “In lucid, playful prose, the author illustrates how politicians have repeatedly misled voters and analyzes the dumbing down of American politics via marketing, spin machines and misinformation.” For politicians to be able to repeatedly mislead voters requires a symbiotic relationship between a local news media uninterested, unwilling or unable to identify marketing, spin and misinformation served up in heaping portions by those same local politicos.
The (mostly) anonymous comments beneath the AnnArbor.com poll are almost more informative than the editorial itself, or even the poll results. A political brown noser regurgitates marketing, spin and misinformation served up by Hieftje time and again almost word-for-word. KMJClark writes:
Didn’t vote because there was no contest in the first ward. The last contested election I missed was when Engler beat Blanchard. I felt so burned by that one that I’ve never missed one since.
But I really think the AA Council is doing a good job. The underground structure is a bit of a boondoggle, but that’s the DDA spending their own money [misinformation]. I think we need more public art in Ann Arbor [marketing]. I think we desperately need expanded transit – including commuter rail – because peak oil and climate change are serious problems [marketing]. Besides that, we’re in a Depression, but Ann Arbor is doing pretty well [misinformation/marketing/spin]. Our crime problem is nothing compared to Detroit’s or most of the rest of the state [misinformation/marketing/spin]. I think if more people read about the Great Depression, they’d also be impressed by how well Ann Arbor is doing [marketing/spin].
If the people griping think they could do a better job, they should run for office.
Then, we have this comment by another reader:
I did not vote because I did not know there was a primary election. I did not know there was an election because the City of Ann Arbor does not have a NEWSPAPER that would inform me of the event and of the choice of candidates. We need a real NEWSPAPER on the streets, in news stands, on front porches. Why can smaller, surrounding communities have a newspaper while the budding metropolis of Ann Arbor is paper free? Quite a shame.
While one could argue that this is the “helpless infant syndrome” complaint—”I did not vote because I did not know there was a primary election”—the writer unwittingly identifies a problem pinpointed by a recent FCC report on the American media. That 475-page report identifies a connection between voter apathy and a serious decline in the quality of local reporting. The FCC report concludes that while there are more options to get our news from, there is infinitely less investigative reporting.
This isn’t the first major report to identify a decline in the quality of local reporting. In 2009, the Columbia Journalism School commissioned a major report on the state of the American news media that concludes, “What is under threat is independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs.”
The 2011 FCC report goes even further and posits that towns in which there is little investigative journalism (the reports calls it “accountability reporting”) there is a serious risk of apathetic, uninformed voters and local government and local schools controlled by people who are rarely held accountable. Towns with media that are incurious or unwilling to investigate claims of wrong-doing and/or corruption, face a risk of public corruption, the report concludes. The FCC’s report is chilling. It’s more chilling still, because it offers a very plausible explanation for Ann Arbor’s terribly apathetic, and uninformed electorate, as well as the city’s consistently poor voter turnout.
Yet another comment on AnnArbor.com, again unwittingly, argues in favor of the FCC’s conclusions. That writer says:
…I think its good to see the other angles as well.. so although they may be your competitors…and I don’t always agree nor disagree with other views… I think its good to read a2politico and the ann arbor chronicle as well. I don’t have to agree with everyone, but I want to listen and respect the views of others.
The FCC report says just that: the answer to the dual dilemmas of voter apathy and local government run for the benefit of, well, local government rather than citizens, won’t be offered up by billion-dollar companies such as Advance Publications or “new” digital products such as AnnArbor.com, but rather independent media, as well as hyper-local news sites and even bloggers.
Tony Dearing’s editorial asks the wrong question and even asks readers to do the site’s homework. According to the FCC report it’s not a useful journalistic service to the community to simply ask why people didn’t vote. Serving up editorial candy does little but give the KMJClarks opportunities to regurgitate the spin, marketing and misinformation they’ve been fed by local politicos. Such journalism is not, however, an opportunity for the community to gain a more profound understanding of the ramifications associated with voter apathy, or to read the quality and kind of local reporting that, in other communities, drives voters to the polls in droves.
@D.P. Liz Brater was convinced to move the primary election from February to August. It was, of course, a way to exclude as many students as possible. Lowering voter turnout significantly benefits incumbency.
As for the AA.Chronicle.com, asking for money is hard. Asking for money from advertisers is even tougher. The site serves a small number of readers (traffic this past year has fallen by 45 percent, according to online sites that measure such data). It’s the Publisher’s job to tend to the financial end. If the business is struggling financially, the answer is to tweak the model (which they’ve been doing) and to tweak the staffing.
Being a paper of record means getting the facts, not simply copying down what people say. I could listen to a recording of the same meeting and come away with the same information. The idea behind having the middle man (and paying) is that the middle man provides a value-added benefit. In the case of the journalist it’s doing more than repeating what was said. AAChronicle.com’s valued-added benefit is that they go and sit through the meetings so that I don’t have to do it. Great. Sell transcripts. Just don’t pass it off as “reporting,” or “journalism.” That’s false advertising.
Good article. Do we have any numbers on voter turnout going back to the 80’s? How does Ann Arbor compare from the days when it was an “All-American City”? Or the 70s or 60s even? I’m guessing voter turnout for an August City Council primary never got anywhere close to 8%, right? It would be nice to see the numbers on that. My guess would be that they started to decline in the 90’s, as the last time I can remember caring about what The Ann Arbor News wrote was around 1989 (and really caring: when they still had Dump the Dope).
One other question: Is the Ann Arbor Chronicle even trying to get revenue from reader subscriptions? I think, in a media-poor town, they’re probably the best thing going (present company excepted), in the sense that at least they serve as a sort of newspaper of record (with transcripts of board meetings, city council meetings, etc. This enables the reader willing to actually read through these to notice, e.g., that our city bends over backwards to ensure that Zingerman’s gets a Brownfield grant (and a critically important $50,000 so they can paint a logo on their roof which will be visible on Google Earth), but does little or nothing about securing money to repair the Stadium Bridge, which could collapse tomorrow.
I guess my point is: I always hear a lot of sniping about Ann Arbor Chronicle and I’m not sure what that’s all about as, until about a year ago, I was living outside of Michigan (since basically 1989, with visits for holidays). But I think if you take them for what they are (or at least what I use them for: a place to read transcripts of city meetings), they would make a great supplemental to a real hometown newspaper that wouldn’t have space to print such things (hopefully because they’d be too busy reporting on local politics and local events).
Let’s be realistic here AA.com isn’t in favor of democracy (unless the rich are those with the most votes) so if they can keep a vote total down it’s a positive. And they work hard not to print any facts or dig into the lies coming out of the mayor and council (they get a pass in the AA.com version of ‘democracy’) so we shouldn’t be surprised by apathy and misinformed voters. We have Fox News at the national level and AA.com at the local level. Not really much difference except Fox is more blatant about their bias while AA.com tries harder to hide it.
Doubt it? Just look at the endorsements for presidents, governors from the AA News and AA.com…
@Peter, cleaning up the voter rolls is the job of the County Clerk, Larry Kestenbaum and the City Clerk. It’s a HUGE problem that there are as many bogus voters listed on the rolls as there are. It impacts recall drives, and ballot initiatives which require collecting a percentage of the registered voters in the city, for instance. It also impacts those who run for office and who want to contact registered voters. It costs candidates in time and wasted money to mail in to voters whom the Clerks claim are registered but who are 30-years-old and clearly no longer live in South Quad.
There is a method in place to purge voter rolls of voters who are no longer living in Ann Arbor, but it is a relatively inefficient system. Given the fact that so much of our personal data exists in computer databases that could be cross-referenced, it seems ridiculous that the voter rolls are so messy. It puts those who want to use ballot initiatives to enact change at a decided disadvantage, and that benefits those currently in office.
I’ve been told that nothing short of a lawsuit will get Ann Arbor’s voter rolls cleaned up. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s clear that the clerks can give you a number of registered voters, but have little idea how accurate that number may actually be.
(let me correct the typos in that one)
The city clerk’s office recently said the number of registered voters is 95,484. Because many voters registered here have moved on but are not removed from the voter rolls, the 95,484 number does not accurately reflect the number of voters in AA. Around 110,000 live in the city. Does anyone have a good guess as to the actual number of registered voters who still live here?
One of the reasons I don’t vote in August primaries is because they are focused on people who closely affiliate with a party. Especially now that the Republican Party chose a closed primary, as an independent I don’t want to have to declare a party to have a say. If our elections were more tailored to everyone (and not just the extremists of the parties) voter rates would go up. When the system is tilted to the extreme, no wonder everyday Americans can’t get excited about it.
I wanna know how much tax-payers are paying for a closed primary. Are we subsidizing the Republican party by paying for their primary – in which only Republicans can vote?