CHICKASHA — Staffing the precinct No. 8 polling site in Grady County, Fern Parish, Mildred Hooper and Betty Spies sat quietly Tuesday afternoon while knitting and snacking on a plate of cookies.
For the vast majority of the day, the only cars in the polling site’s parking lot belonged to the three election officials, and by 1 p.m. Tuesday — halfway through the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift for Oklahoma’s primary election runoff — exactly 12 people voted at the precinct that includes more than 1,200 registered voters.
“I forgot to bring my book … or even a deck of cards,” Hooper said. “We prefer to be busy, but it’s pretty slow.”
With relatively low turnout numbers reported at Grady County and across the state for this week’s runoff election, some question whether the price tag for staging a separate runoff is too high and if the state should explore other methods that could avoid the low turnout contests.
The cost and alternative methods
State Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said the typical runoff election sets the state back $850,000 in order to pay election officials, rent space for voting locations and take care of printing and administrative costs.
Tuesday’s races featured a pair of Republican congressional races, seven state legislature contests and the GOP state insurance commissioner match-up. Since the insurance commissioner was the only statewide race, all of the about 2,200 precincts across the state were open and many, such as Grady County, only featured that race on their ballot.
Ziriax said voter turnout for the insurance commissioner contest was 14.5 percent of registered Republicans. He said this figure matches up with his expectation of runoffs to result in “low to very low” turnouts.
University of Oklahoma political science professor Keith Gaddie said Oklahoma is one of 10 states that use separate runoff elections. Although he said abandoning the separate runoff election for primaries could save the state money, he said they do serve a purpose and are a better tool than selecting party nominees without a majority vote.
“Runoff elections were started to keep candidates with a low level of support in a large candidate field from winning,” he said. “The goal is to ensure you’re not going to elect some fringe candidate that is not going to win (in the general election).”
An alternate solution that would remove the need for a separate runoff, Gaddie said, is moving to an “instant runoff.” In this process, voters would rank the candidates during the primary rather than selecting their single choice. If no candidate reaches the 50 percent threshold, candidates with the lowest number of votes are eliminated and the votes are redistributed according to the voters’ rankings.
Lawmakers: Election changes unlikely
Sen. John Sparks, D-Norman, said he supports the current election process and does not see a change on the horizon. He said instituting an instant primary would be “inherently confusing” to voters. In addition, he said the runoff gives voters another chance to learn about the candidates.
“If the particular candidate you voted for doesn’t make the top two, you get some more time to re-evaluate your choices,” he said. “It is pretty simple and straightforward.”
Rep. Randy McDaniel, R-Edmond, said he too acknowledges many of the merits of continuing the runoff election policies to ensure voters’ voices are heard. However, he said he’d be open to considering new ideas if it makes fiscal sense.
“We need to look at every way we can to save taxpayers’ money,” he said. “Looking at reforms at how we do elections is worthy of consideration.”
However, McDaniel said the issue has not garnered much attention from lawmakers in the past, and he is not aware of any “movement afoot” to push for reform. Rep. Ben Sherrer, D-Pryor Creek, agreed it has not been, and is not expected to be, a “hot-button” issue for lawmakers.
“My knee-jerk reaction is elected legislators as a whole don’t have a real big issue with the current process,” Sherrer said. “In my six years (in the legislature) there has been zero discourse on it.”
Gaddie said lawmakers are naturally wary of making changes to the election process because they can view it as a threat to their re-election prospects or because it could repudiate their past victories if they benefited previously by a runoff election.
“Incumbents don’t like to change the system of the elections that they got elected under,” he said. “Their biggest concern is that (an instant runoff) could encourage more people to run.”
Fern Parish, who is a longtime poll worker in Chickasha, said she would like officials to explore any way to save money that will also keep people active and interested in the electoral process.
“I’m retired now, so I’m always looking at how things affect my budget,” she said. “And I think, as a taxpayer, the state should do the same thing,” she said.
Trevor Brown covers the Oklahoma statehouse for CNHI and the Transcript. He can be reached at tbrown@cnhi.com.
