Spin control: Did poor marketing sink Crime Check?

The proposal to increase the sales tax in Spokane County by one-tenth of a cent to help pay for emergency communications and Crime Check failed by fewer than 300 votes, which puts it in the “close but no cigar” category of local elections.

But maybe it was even closer. Last week’s final tally suggests it might have been put over the top by a little bit harder of a sales pitch.

That’s because more than 5,100 voters left the sales tax proposal blank. They didn’t vote yes or no, which in election lingo is known as an “undervote.” The motivation – or the lack of it – behind undervoting varies.

Sometimes it’s a complicated ballot proposal: A voter hasn’t had time to study it and doesn’t want to make a wrong choice.

Sometimes the two candidates are complete unknowns, and the voter figures either, or neither, would do a good job.

Sometimes a voter is uninterested – just shrugs and moves on to the next item on the ballot.

In the case of the ballot proposal to raise the sales tax, however, one has to wonder whether supporters just didn’t do a good enough job to close the deal.

Based on the last decade or so of statewide initiatives, it’s pretty safe to assume voters are predisposed to vote against any tax increase, so the first thing the proposal had to get over was the automatic “no” vote. They apparently did that.

But for at least 5,100 of those voters, it was only part way to a “yes” vote.

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said after the election that the measure may have been hurt by not having the words “Crime Check” on the ballot, and this may back him up.

There was no organized campaign, except for Knezovich’s regular appearances on the late, lamented Mark Fuhrman radio show. With a bit more organization – and maybe some signs, billboards or radio ads – it’s quite possible the proposal would have turned at least 300 of those “I don’t knows” to “yes.”

Before supporters decide to take another run at this, they should remember the old salesman’s admonition: “Always be closing.”

Numbers. We got numbers

One other bit of number crunching before we lay the Nov. 6 election to rest:

Slightly more than half the voters in Spokane County managed to mark a ballot and get it to the elections office for the Nov. 6 election.

That fact alone can send civic activists into a deep funk. “Only one out of two voters voted? What’s democracy coming to? Oh the shame of it all!”

Spin Control’s opinion of turnout is much simpler. It is what it is. Never as good as the secretary of state wants it to be, never as bad as the good government types claim it is.

After all, isn’t it logical to assume that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, populists and progressives tend to not vote in about the same proportion that they do vote? And except for those rare races separated by a ballot or two, has anyone ever proved the results would have been different if turnout had been 10 percent or 40 percent higher?

But the real interesting thing about turnout in most elections, this one included, is the way it fluctuates throughout the county. A computer analysis of the vote totals shows turnout was particularly heavy in some south and northwest Spokane precincts, and some rural areas in the southern third of the county. It was particularly light in northeast Spokane, and parts of the Spokane Valley north of Interstate 90.

That kind of variation in turnout does have a chance of affecting results, because not all areas vote alike. That’s what civic activists need to be concerned about. A map of the voter turnout by precinct is available on the online version of this column, at www.spokesmanreview.com/ blogs/spincontrol.

Why isn’t it here? Well, it has to be really big and in color to be readable.

Also online

If you check out the map, you can also check out one of the more interesting things to come out of last week’s special session, a YouTube video by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

Not clear yet whether this is a sign of a bright future or the impending apocalypse. It’s interesting to watch, but each viewer will have to decide whether the folks at EFF have the new medium down.