On April 21st, there will be various local tax elections. This is especially the time when school boards, parish sheriffs and parish governments hold elections to raise, extend or rededicate taxes. One question that should be asked is “why would a school board or other taxing authority hold a special election, when it has to pay the full cost of holding the election, when we have a national election that it could just piggyback on?”
Well, if the school board held its election during a nationwide or statewide election, when there is a lot of motivation to vote (for instance, people feel very strongly for and against President Obama, and both of these sides will be out to vote in full force). But what about a school tax election? Especially one to be held on a Saturday (April 21st , the Saturday after Spring Break). Were you even awarethat there was going to be an election then? For most voters, that election is “under the radar.” And that is exactly how the school boards want it.
These elections typically have turnout averaging somewhere around 15 0r 16 percent of voters. However, school boards are very good at rallying their workers, who stand to benefit from the proposals by quite a bit. Below is a copy of an email sent out to all employees of St. Charles Parish Schools urging them and their families to vote to rededicate taxes to pay for bonds to replace temporary classrooms with permanent structures.
Good Morning,
This is Superintendent Rodney Lafon.
As you know the school system has a very important Bond Issue on the April 21st ballot. The purpose of the Bond Issue is to reduce the number of current portables from 74 to 10 and replace them with permanent structures without increasing the current tax rate.
Early voting for the election starts today and will run through April 14th. You can cast your vote at either the Registrar of Voters Office in the Courthouse or at the Arterbury Building in New Sarpy. These locations will be open from 8:30am-6:00pm each day with the exception of Easter Sunday.
If you have or know of college age children who are in for the Easter break, please encourage them to vote before heading back to school.
For more information please visit the district’s website at www.stcharles.k12.la.us/april21bondissue.
What happens with the low turnout but high turnout by those who benefit from the proposal is that the proposal is much more likely to pass. With concentrated benefits from the proposal, but costs spread out widely among the voters and taxpayers, the chance of passage is increased.
It all starts with the rational decisions of the individual voter, a comparison of the expected benefits of voting versus the sure costs of voting. To vote requires the conscious act of going to the voting place and voting. There is a cost of doing this, going out of your normal path, albeit a rather small one. The expected benefits of voting involve a combination of the probability of changing the outcome with the payoff of their favored outcome winning instead of losing. When the costs of the taxes are spread out amongst a large group, the costs to any one voter/taxpayer are not so high, and so the benefits of voting for these are quite low. If the taxes from the many are concentrated on but a few, the expected benefits per person are quite high. The net beneficiaries vote, while the net taxpayers don’t bother to vote.
While not a “special election” think of the recent election of considerably higher fees all concentrated on various student organizations at the university. Those organizations that stood to benefit surely had all of their members out voting, while the very many students who would have benefited more by the failure of the fees tended not to show up.
Here is what the Nicholls Worth had to say: “In fact, we have information that certain organization members involved with the 4 percent referendum said that the reason they objected to our article and why the referendum was not campaigned about was because they wanted it to fly under the radar. They wanted the majority of the students who voted on it to be members of the involved organizations so that it would pass.” The Nicholls Worth also reported that its writers and workers became targets of members of these various student organizations. Hmm. We will see that this is a repeated theme.
And what was the overall turnout like? The Nicholls Worth reports that only 823 out of 6100 students turned out to vote. That is only 13.5% of the students voting. That means that only 412 students needed to vote for the referendum to get it to pass. And while I did not see the wording of the referendum, I bet that it was a bundled, up/down vote on all of the fees together, rather than separate votes on each fee request by each organization, so that all of the student organizations that stood to gain became allies on the vote.
Gary Pecquet of Central Michigan, Steven Yen of the University of Tennessee and I wrote about the manipulation of the election timing back in 1996 in our paper, “Special Versus General Elections and Composition of the Voters: Evidence from Louisiana School Tax Elections” in Public Finance Review. Almost 16 years ago I wrote this column for the Houma Courier, and based on my analysis, a writer for the Daily Comet wrote a column against a tax increase proposed by the Lafourche Parish Sheriff. One of sheriff’s deputies met up with the writer in a Thibodaux bar and punched him out. Who says academics don’t have an effect?
-MC