Various KPR news

[NICK HAINES] Good evening, stations, it's Thursday, July 28th, on the feed is a seven minute, eleven second depth piece which can be used on-- [audio cuts] --races, campaign strategists are predicting abnormally low voter turnout but also complaining about how difficult it is to motivate voters. With little time to go before the polling stations open, Nick Hanes has been talking-- [audio cuts] --the thirteen candidates in the Kansas governor's race have already collectively spent nearly three million dollars promoting their campaign messages across the state. The money has gone towards such things as TV advertising, radio spots, yard signs, and bulk mailings, but despite the tremendous cost of bombarding Kansans with campaign slogans, many voters it seems still have difficulty naming even some of the so-called frontrunners in the race. We went on to the streets of Topeka to assess candidate name recognition. Sue Hunt is a librarian and a registered Democrat. We asked her to name as many of the 13 candidates in the governor's race as she could. [Hunt] Let's see, there's Jim Slattery, there's Fred Phelps...and

that's about it in terms of-- Bill Graves is a Democrat, right, or is he a Republican? [NICK HAINES] He's a Republican. [Hunt] Republican, ok. [NICK HAINES] Matching names with the political party was difficult for almost everyone we interviewed. Some people also have trouble identifying candidates with the race they were actually running in. Martha Dobson is a retired guidance counselor from Topeka. She's a registered Republican. We asked her to name candidates in the governor's race as well. [Dobson] Graves is one, and Kerr, and hmm [laughs] what's the man who's a businessman, he's going to take care of us because he's a businessman? [NICK HAINES] Gene Bicknell. [Dobson] Bicknell and Hume, is he a Democrat? [NICK HAINES] He's going to be in the second congressional race, the district race. [Dobson] That's right, that's right. [NICK HAINES] Naming candidates in the governor's race is tough enough. Going further down the ballot is even more difficult. We asked Sue Hunt of Topeka to name just one of the five candidates in

this year's secretary of state's race. [Hunt] The secretary of state? No I can't. [NICK HAINES] So on your ticket you're gonna see there Paula Jasso-Wedel of Topeka and you're going to see Fran Lee of Topeka. So you see that in the box, what would you do? [Hunt] I've never heard of either one of them, and so at this point, again, I try not to vote for either one, because I don't know anything about them. [NICK HAINES] So you just leave that section blank? [Hunt] I leave that blank, yeah. [NICK HAINES] Statistics in Kansas show conclusively that after voting in the top two races in any given election, many voters decide not to select candidates further down on the ballot. In 1990, while nearly half a million Kansans voted to choose their party's candidate for governor, only 360,000 cast a vote in the secretary of state's race. There are some voters though who insist on making some form of selection in every race, even if they don't know who the candidates are. Voters like Martha Dodson of Topeka. [Dodson] I would probably choose a woman if I had a

choice and didn't know any of them. [NICK HAINES] So you have two men and a woman in a race and you're going to choose the woman if you didn't have any of the information? [Dodson] If I didn't have any information I would probably choose the woman. [NICK HAINES] Can I ask you why? [Dodson] I think they deserve a chance. [NICK HAINES] But if there were two women, what happens then? [Dodson] Oh well then I'd be in a hard place, I don't-- [NICK HAINES] Would the place they come from be more important then? [Dodson] I think that might be, I would expect that-- maybe a woman in a more urban area might be better qualified, might be better trained. [NICK HAINES] So if you saw a woman from Topeka you'd more likely choose them than one from say Colby, Kansas? [Dodson] I might. [NICK HAINES] Robert Davies from Merriam also refuses to leave a gap on the ballot when he doesn't know who the candidates are. Davies admits though, his method of choosing candidates on those occasions is less than scientific. [Davies] This may sound-- probably close my eyes and punch, just punch something,

good or bad, that's still my decision. [NICK HAINES] You would not leave a gap? [Davies] Oh no, if you fail to vote or not select a candidate, you have no right to gripe. [NICK HAINES] At the Kansas secretary of state's office, which is responsible for the conduct of elections, John Reinhart says he's not surprised by the random way some people vote. He says his office has been receiving anecdotal reports for years about how some voters just choose the first name they see on the ballot. Reinhart says that's why in 1973 the state began rotating the names of the candidates on the ballot so that each person appeared at the top just as many times as their political opposition. [Reinhart] Now obviously because you only go vote one time in one precinct, you don't see that, but if you were to look at the all of the ballots, you would see somebody's name-- a different candidate's name at the top at different times, different ballots, and different precincts. [NICK HAINES] The random nature in which some voters choose candidates in statewide races concerns political scientists like Professor Russell Getter at the University of Kansas. Coupled with

low voter turnout, Getter has serious doubts about the value of allowing voters to decide the political fate of certain officeholders. In 1990, only one in three registered voters took the time to go to the ballot box. Even less were involved in selecting candidates for such offices as state treasurer and insurance commissioner. Getter says it may be time to change the rules of the game. [Getter] It can be argued and has been argued by a number of constitutional scholars, that positions such as the insurance commissioner's post and the secretary of state's position and perhaps the state treasurer also ought to be appointed by the governor rather than having them be independently elected positions and I think that if you ask the incumbents in those offices whether they think that they are well-known across the state by the citizens of this state, most of them if they answer truthfully will answer that no they are not well-known. It's hard to imagine that you

can have a successful democratic enterprise when the voters don't even know who the incumbent officers are. [NICK HAINES] Professor John Franke, a political scientist at Kansas State University, says while Kansans might not make full use of their right to select candidates at all levels of state government, he would still prefer the current primary system than other suggested methods of selecting candidates. [Franke] Historically the alternative has been to have a smaller group of party leaders decide on who is going to be nominated. I think party primaries are much more representative of what the party wants, than having a small group of party leaders make those decisions. That's not to say that there aren't any number of things that could possibly be done to encourage greater participation in these kinds of elections. We hold them during the week and people have to get off work and so on and so forth. As far as I'm concerned, there's no real need for that, more convenient day...if you really want to get more people involved.

[NICK HAINES] For now though, the primary election does fall on a weekday. Polling stations open at seven a.m. on Tuesday, earlier in some places, and will close at seven in the evening. At the state house, this is Nick Haines reporting.