By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – President Obama, Congressman David Cicilline and other Democrats were propelled to victory last November by a surge in voting by Hispanic and black Rhode Islanders as well as a sharp drop in participation among white citizens, a WPRI.com analysis of new Census data shows.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island is finally at the top of a set of national rankings, but Gov. Lincoln Chafee probably isn’t too happy about it.

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Rhode Island’s 2011 voter ID law was a hot topic on the campaign trail in some General Assembly races last fall, with Democrats in liberal districts saying they got an earful about the need to repeal it. House Speaker Gordon Fox has promised to consider the issue this session.

The strange spectacle of a heavily Democratic legislature implementing a policy that’s usually pushed by conservative Republicans raised eyebrows at The New Republic and deeply dismayed many local liberals. But should they rethink their opposition to voter ID?

Michael Waldman, president of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, seems to think so – and his voice will carry weight, considering the Brennan Center is one of the nation’s most prominent voting-rights organizations. In the new issue of the influential progressive journal Democracy, Waldman pushes for an aggressive agenda – and tells his political allies they should look to Rhode Island for a model:

Progressives will need to do much better, too, at making clear our commitment to election integrity. …

[P]rogressives look Pollyannaish if we belittle concerns about election integrity. After all, politicians have been trying to stuff the ballot box since senators wore togas. It was progressive reformers who fought for decades to improve the honesty and integrity of elections. …

I believe progressives must take one more step. We should unambiguously embrace an election-integrity agenda that protects against genuine risks without disenfranchising legitimate voters. The Republican demand for voter-ID laws is not the problem per se. The problem comes from laws requiring ID that many people do not have. About 11 percent of voters lack a driver’s license or another current government photo ID. Rhode Island, in contrast to the stricter ID laws conservatives favor, passed a law that accepts nongovernmental ID such as insurance cards, credit or debit cards, even health-club cards. This approach has caused little disenfranchisement or fraud.

Rhode Island’s law is being phased in, with some forms of non-photo ID still allowed this year. Photo IDs – though not necessarily government-issued ones – will be required at the polls starting next year. A bill to repeal voter ID [pdf] was considered by the House Judiciary Committee last week.

• Related: Is RI’s new voter ID law just an ‘oddity’ – or a ‘game changer’? (July 28, 2011)

First they took away our exit polls, and now they’re insulting us about it.

Michael Calderone reports for The Huffington Post (emphasis added):

NBC elections director Sheldon Gawiser, who has worked on every presidential contest since 1976, said the network-AP consortium has made some changes this cycle in exit polling, given increased early voting and a focus on battleground states.

For instance, given the huge percentage of early voting in Colorado and Oregon, executives saw less reason to have someone asking questions on the ground at polling sites in those states. While there will be full exit polling in Massachusetts, given its highly competitive Senate race, other states not believed to be in contention for the presidential race will not have such extensive exit polls.

“Why should I put a lot of resources in Utah or Vermont or Rhode Island?” Gawiser asked, adding that the consortium has “put our resources where the stories are and where the states are most important.”

The lack of a Rhode Island exit poll means there is no snapshot available of who exactly went to vote in the state on Tuesday – by gender, race, income, party or anything else – leaving a major hole in our understanding of this year’s results.

• Related: Chart: How many people vote in RI elections, and who they are (Nov. 6)

Who’s going to vote today? The answer could decide (among other things) whether Rhode Island’s 1st District sends Congressman Cicilline or Congressman Doherty to Washington come January.

Rhode Island’s last general election was on Nov. 2, 2010, but the electorate that casts ballots today will look more like the one that went to the polls four years ago, on Nov. 4, 2008, because turnout is always higher in presidential years than in midterm/gubernatorial ones.

Here’s the data on Rhode Island turnout, as compiled by WPRI 12 political analyst Joe Fleming:

The first question is, will Rhode Island voter turnout stay at the 67% level reached in 2008, or will it fall back to the 61% level seen in the 2004 and 2000 elections? Those six percentage points might not sound like much, but they’d be the difference between 447,513 and 491,531 votes – about 44,000 ballots, more than enough to swing a close race; Cicilline beat John Loughlin by 9,727 in 2010.

The next question: who exactly will those 447,000 to 491,000 voters be?

As Yogi Berra once remarked, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. But we can take a look at Rhode Island’s last two presidential electorates and get a sense of who’s going to show up tomorrow.

A few things seem highly likely: more women will show up at the polls than men; about one in five voters will be young; Democrats and independents will vastly outnumber Republicans. But will the share of non-white voters jump again? Will Democrats top 40%?

The answers won’t be known until after Tuesday. (Actually, they won’t be known at all – Rhode Island’s exit poll was canceled to save money.) But here’s a look at who voted in 2004 and 2008 so you can see trends:

Is Rhode Island ready for a close election Tuesday? An exhaustive recent study raises some concerns.

Common Cause and the Verified Voting Foundation published a 331-page study [pdf] in July warning that many of the nation’s states have voting systems that are likely to fail. And Rhode Island was among the states that received an overall grade of “Needs Improvement.”

Here’s how Rhode Island stacked up by category:

• Paper Ballots and Records: Paper Ballots
• Polling Place Contingency Plans: Not Applicable
• Voted Ballot Return for UOCAVA Voters: Inadequate
• Post-Election Audits: Inadequate
• Ballot Accounting and Reconciliation: Generally Good

Common Cause Rhode Island has been sounding the alarm about the state’s aging voting machines for a while, and the disputed San Bento-Tobon recount two months ago has also increased doubts about those processes. After the jump, read what the study had to say about Rhode Island in the different categories: (more…)

By Tim White

PAWTUCKET, R.I. (WPRI) – Hoping the state’s high court will force the Board of Elections to conduct a manual recount in a tight legislative race, the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is expecting to file a lawsuit Monday.

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• Related: Marion: After San Bento v. Tobon, here’s how to fix voting in RI (Sept. 25)

By John Marion

It has quickly entered the folklore of Rhode Island politics: the election decided by a single vote after four different counts. What really happened in the Democratic primary in House District 58 and what lessons can we learn from it? Here’s what I saw when I attended last week’s recounts and what I think we should do differently.

On the night of Sept. 11, Rhode Islanders were told District 58 had cast 543 votes for veteran incumbent Rep. William San Bento and 540 for challenger Carlos Tobon. But the winner was not yet clear, because while that initial count included all mail (or absentee) ballots, it didn’t include 11 “provisional” ballots.

Provisional ballots are cast for a variety of reasons – for example if a voter arrives at a polling place but isn’t listed on the rolls or, starting this year, if a voter doesn’t show up with an approved form of idenitifcation. The local canvassers then must decide whether the provisional ballot should be counted. The Pawtucket Board of Canvassers counted only three of 11 provisionals that were cast in the District 58 primary – it’s not clear why the other eight were rejected.

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The health care ruling wasn’t the only major decision the U.S. Supreme Court handed down late last month. On June 25, the high court’s five conservative justices struck down a Montana law limiting campaign spending by corporations to the dismay of Citizens United opponents.

By coincidence, the following day Governor Chafee signed into law the new campaign finance disclosure legislation [pdf] championed by Rep. Chris Blazejewski, D-Providence, and backed by Rhode Island’s top three elected officials: Lincoln Chafee, Gordon Fox and M. Teresa Paiva Weed.

What, if anything, does the Montana decision mean for Rhode Island’s new law? In an email, Blazejewski said the law is meant for the post-Citizens United landscape reflected in the justices’ latest ruling:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Montana case makes Rhode Island’s new disclosure law more important than ever. The Supreme Court in the Montana case upheld the central outcome in Citizens United, namely that corporations, unions, and other outside groups – including and especially Super PACs – can spend limitless amounts of money influencing our elections. With the Supreme Court’s clear statement that it will not reconsider this damaging decision, Rhode Island’s new disclosure law responds by providing for enhanced disclosure requirements, as expressly contemplated by the Supreme Court, that seek to shine a light and provide greater transparency on the potentially limitless spending of outside groups in our elections.

The new law – which includes a requirement that the final four seconds of independent groups’ political TV ads list its major donors – takes effect immediately, with the first disclosures due by Aug. 1.

• Related: Q&A: How RI’s new Super PAC disclosure rules would work (Feb. 16)

(photo: Ted Nesi/WPRI)

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The R.I. Board of Elections may reclassify Rhode Island voters’ phone numbers and email addresses as confidential information after a New Hampshire politician who supports killing police officers published them online.

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Graziano in 2002

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The 80-year-old former lawmaker who challenged state Sen. Frank Ciccone in the last three elections says she won’t seek a rematch in November, but she’s shocked by allegations that her former opponent tried to intimidate police.

“How could anybody be so stupid?” Catherine Graziano, a Democratic state senator from 1993 to 2002, told WPRI.com on Tuesday. “If you’re going to do something like that, don’t do that in public.”

“God love ‘em, I give those police officers a lot of credit,” said Graziano, a retired Salve Regina University nursing professor who lives in Providence. “They didn’t bend, they didn’t bow. They did just what they were supposed to do, and now it’s something people are talking about.”

Graziano unsuccessfully challenged Ciccone, D-Providence, for the Democratic nomination in Senate District 7 in both 2006 and 2008, coming within 194 votes of defeating him the second time. She ran against him again in 2010, this time in the general election as an independent, and lost in a landslide. But the senator victory didn’t come cheap.

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Gov. Lincoln Chafee is pretty tough on his former compatriots in the Republican Party these days. But he still has a few things in common with them.

Chafee is the only governor in the United States who signed a voter ID bill into law last year who wasn’t a Republican, The Washington Post reported Tuesday after the Obama administration blocked a new law in Texas that would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot.

The U.S. Justice Department does not have the legal authority to block Rhode Island’s law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, but The Post reported federal lawyers could try to do so under a different provision of the 1965 legislation. Democratic governors vetoed voter ID laws in at least five other states last year.

“Having reflected a great deal on the issue, I believe that requiring identification at the polling place is a reasonable request to ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections,” Chafee said after signing the bill behind closed doors last July, adding that minority lawmakers’ arguments for it were “particularly compelling.”

Chafee left the Republican Party in 2007 and won the governor’s office as an independent three years later.

• Related: New Republic piece puzzles out why RI passed a voter ID law (Feb. 7)

It’s not often you see Common Cause Rhode Island‘s John Marion sharing a podium with Governor Chafee, House Speaker Fox and Senate President Paiva Weed.

But that’s what happened Thursday afternoon as they and others gathered at the State House to throw their support behind new legislation that would beef up campaign-finance disclosure rules for outside groups like the much-talked-about Super PACs. (Paiva Weed even mentioned Stephen Colbert’s.) They want the requirements in place before the November election.

After the event, Marion sat down with me to explain what the proposed Transparency in Political Spending Act would and wouldn’t do. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Who is this bill going to impact? What will they have to do?

This bill is going to impact any group that decides to advocate for or against one of the items on the November ballot, such as the referendum about expanding gaming in the state. It will require those groups to disclose information about their spending in a more timely fashion then they current have to, and it will require for the first time disclosure of the underlying sources of funding to the group.

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Rhode Island’s public-sector unions are expected to try and defeat some of the dozens of Democrats who voted for last year’s pension law in the September primary. But State Rep. Jon Brien, one of the most conservative members of the House Democratic caucus, has filed a bill he hopes will help protect his colleagues.

Brien’s legislation would allow independent voters who join a party solely in order to cast a primary ballot to leave the party right after they vote. Right now, they stay listed as a member of the party whose primary they voted in for 90 days after the election.

“They don’t want to be a part of a party,” Brien, D-Woonsocket, told WPRI.com. “When you’re knocking on doors, people are skittish. The thing that I hear the most out there is, ‘I don’t like to show my hand.’ No one wants to show who they belong to. … It’s really creating open primaries.”

“I can go out there and say to all my unaffiliated voters, ‘You’ve got to come vote for me in the primary, and as soon as you disaffiliate, you’re done,’” Brien said. “That takes away the edge that the unions have had, where they’ve beaten a David Caprio or a Doug Gablinske or a Mary Shallcross Smith as a punishment for votes.”

The bill – which was drafted incorrectly [pdf] and will be replaced by a “Sub A” – has a hearing Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. Brien said he’s discussed it with Speaker Gordon Fox, “and he thought it was a very worthy idea.” (A spokesman for Fox was not immediately available.) Other bill sponsors include Reps. Michael Marcello, Lisa Baldelli-Hunt and Donald Lally.

Update: Larry Berman, a spokesman for Fox, said it’s possible the speaker will back Brien’s legislation.

“Speaker Fox shares Representative Brien’s belief we should encourage people to actively participate in all aspects of government, particularly voting,” Berman told WPRI.com. “If this bill makes people more likely to vote in the primary then that is a positive step in increasing citizen participation. The speaker will consider all testimony submitted at the committee hearing and make a determination on how to proceed.”

The pension overhaul wasn’t the only surprising-for-a-blue-state policy Rhode Island enacted in 2011. Another that passed to liberals’ dismay was the new law requiring that voters show an ID before they cast a ballot.

The New Republic’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood, who graduated from Brown last year, returned to Rhode Island recently in an effort to answer the question that headlines his new article, out today: “Why Did Liberal African-Americans in Rhode Island Help Pass a Voter ID Law?”

Here’s an excerpt:

Whether minority legislators voted for voter ID in good faith, or to disenfranchise ethnic rivals, the law effectively contributes to the state’s increasingly conservative slant. More important, Rhode Island’s poor, elderly, and minority citizens risk losing their vote when the law takes effect in 2014. And while Rhode Island’s law is actually more lenient than those passed in other states, and was not part of the centralized Republican push to move such bills through state legislatures, it may have more staying power.

Read the whole story here. (Full disclosure: Simon interviewed me as he prepared his story.) The best quote comes from State Rep. Anastasia Williams, D-Providence, who tells TNR she noticed one particular case of voter fraud because the alleged perpetrator “was a hottie.”

• Related: Is RI’s new voter ID law just an ‘oddity’ – or a ‘game changer’? (July 28)

Rhode Island’s 18-member Special Commission on Reapportionment posted its schedule of public hearings on Friday – the day before a holiday weekend, which is of course the time anyone would reveal important information you want the citizenry to notice.

The hearings on how to divvy up the state’s political boundaries begin Tuesday night at Warwick City Hall. The full list is on the RIRedistricting.com website. But the Pawtucket Times’ Jim Baron reports not all sections of the state are created equal:

The committee this week scheduled six public hearings across the state throughout October seeking public comment from citizens about what the new districts … but none of those sessions will be held farther north than the Statehouse. …

Asked about the lack of meetings in the northern part of the state, House spokesman Larry Berman said, “Providence County is by far the largest of our state’s counties, and that is why the redistricting committee is holding two public meetings in the county – in Johnston and in Providence – compared to one meeting in every other county. While there was no slight intended to Northern Rhode Island, we have a very small state and we encourage Northern Rhode Island residents to attend the hearings scheduled for Johnston and Providence.”

The pool of potential Hispanic voters in Rhode Island is growing at a fast clip while the number of white voters is shrinking, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Rhode Island’s Hispanic voting-age population grew by 13,000 from November 2008 to November 2010, raising the total number to 84,000, Census estimates show.

By contrast, the population of white voting-age Rhode Islanders dropped by 20,000 over the same period, falling to 649,000. That figure excludes Hispanics.

Hispanic Rhode Islanders are far less likely to be registered to vote than their whites neighbors, however, with only 24% of eligible Hispanics registered compared with 71% of non-Hispanic whites, the Census said.

The report also showed last fall’s midterm election drew relatively few young residents and Hispanic citizens to the polls in Rhode Island.

(more…)

The Democratic Party’s edge among Rhode Island voters has plunged over the past two years, a WPRI.com analysis of Gallup polling data shows.

The Democratic advantage over the Republican Party in Rhode Island slid from 37 percentage points in 2008 to 16 points this year, according to Gallup. The Ocean State has gone from being the most Democratic state in the country in 2008 to the 7th-most Democratic now.

Gallup calculates a state’s partisan preference based on the difference between the percentage of state residents who identify as or lean Democratic and the percentage who identify as or lean Republican. The 12.2-point drop for Democrats in Rhode Island from 2008 to 2010 was the most in the nation, the polling firm said.

“There is a very distinct – and surprising – trend line in these numbers,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at The Cook Political Report in Washington and a native Rhode Islander. “While Rhode Island certainly remains one of the most Democratic states in the country, there is a clear erosion in support for Democrats.”

A decline in the Democratic Party’s fortunes locally hasn’t necessarily translated into a surge of support for the GOP, however. A whopping 60% of Rhode Islanders identified as independents in Gallup’s polling during the first half of this year, the most in any state. That’s up from 53% in 2008.

“Many states with high proportions of independents are dominated by one party electorally,” Gallup said – meaning many of Rhode Island’s self-identified independents are still likely to vote for a Democrat when they go to the polls.

It’s unclear why there’s been such a marked decline in how many Rhode Islanders side with the Democrats. For one thing, 2008 was a banner year for Democrats, which may have inflated the party’s numbers locally. The unemployment rate has been above 10% in Rhode Island every month since March 2009, as well.

“It could be because voters are simply frustrated with a lack of jobs and the struggling economy, but President Obama may be part of the problem here as well,” Duffy said. Obama’s approval rating was down to 44% in a March poll by Brown University.

“No scandal-free Democratic president should have an approval rating under 50% in the 7th-most Democratic state in the nation,” Duffy said.

Rhode Island isn’t the only blue state where Democrats lost ground. The party’s advantage in Massachusetts fell from 34 points in 2008 to 20 points this year, and its advantage in Hawaii declined from 34 points to 24.

• Related: Is Rhode Island really a blue state? Weighing the evidence (July 14)

I’ve been keeping an eye on the National Popular Vote initiative, which aims to neutralize the Electoral College by having states’ electors cast their ballots for whichever presidential candidate wins the largest number of votes nationwide.

Here’s how it would work: a majority of Rhode Island voters chose John Kerry in 2004, but under this system the state’s electoral votes would have gone to George W. Bush, since he won the most votes nationwide. In 2008, the opposite would have happened in, say, Utah; its electors would have voted for Obama, not McCain.

The switch to the National Popular Vote system won’t take place in the states that adopt it until at least half the nation’s electoral votes (270) are in play. The movement took a big step forward this week when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law adding the Golden State’s 55 votes to the mix, bringing the total pledged so far to 132, nearly half the number needed.

The proposal could upend the current presidential campaign process, where candidates spend most of their time in battleground states. Republican candidates would now have a reason to campaign in vote-rich blue states, and vice-versa for Democrats, since those ballots would matter even if the state in which they were cast has a firm partisan tilt one way. It would be nice to have the whole country involved in our biggest exercise in democracy. (Not everyone likes the idea, though; see Anchor Rising for arguments against it.)

Rhode Island has been wrestling with whether to join the National Popular Vote compact for a few years now. Both chambers of the General Assembly passed a bill to do so in 2008, but Governor Carcieri vetoed it. Since then the proposal has twice passed the Senate easily – 26-9 in 2009 and 30-4 this year – but died in the House.

One thing that has changed is the man sitting in the governor’s office; Lincoln Chafee has voiced support for the National Popular Vote in the past. So it’s possible Rhode Island’s four electoral votes could be added to the movement’s total down the line.

It’s not easy to rock the vote in Rhode Island.

That’s according to a new scorecard from Rock the Vote that ranks Rhode Island’s voting system 10th-lowest based on 12 metrics related to voter registration; casting a ballot; and young voter participation.

Rhode Island scored a 30%, better than neighboring Connecticut (20%) and Massachusetts (28%). The top state was Washington at 68%; the worst were South Carolina and Virginia, both at 18%.

I asked Secretary of State Ralph Mollis for his reaction, and he sent along this statement highlighting his office’s efforts on these fronts:

In reality, Rhode Island is doing very well. We estimate that 77% of eligible Rhode Islanders age 18-24 are registered to vote, well above the national average of 58.5%.

We work tirelessly to produce those results. We stage college and high school voter registration drives, take civic education into the schools and won one of only eight national grants for young voter engagement last year.

My office has made it a priority to educate and register future voters in an effort to get them involved. We will continue these efforts and will do so with an eye towards some of the factors that Rock the Vote lists in order to improve our ranking within their list as well as improve the turnout of young voters on Election Day.

Here’s how Rhode Island stacked up in Rock the Vote’s methodology:

• Automatic registration: 1 / 3
• Permanent and portable registration: 0 / 3
• Online registration: 0 / 3
• Same-day registration: 0 / 3
• Third-party registration: 1 / 1

• Voter ID requirements: 2 / 2
• Convenience voting: 0 / 2
• Residency requirements: 0.5 / 1
• Absentee voting: 0.5 / 1
• Overseas and military voting: 0.3 / 1

• High school civics: 0 / 2
• Pre-registration: 1 / 1

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Sarah Palin is far from beloved here in the nation’s most liberal state.

That’s according to new results from the Public Policy Polling survey, which also found President Obama is on track to easily defeat four of his potential Republican opponents in Rhode Island next year.

Rhode Island voters are overwhelmingly down on Palin, with 69% having an unfavorable opinion of her against just 24% with a favorable one. She’s polarizing, too; slightly more people – 8% – were unsure how they felt about President Obama than Palin (7%).

Palin is also extremely unpopular among young Rhode Islanders – a whopping 80% of voters ages 18-29 have an unfavorable opinion of her, compared with about 68% among those 30 and up. Obama would defeat Palin 77%-13% among those youngest voters in a presidential race.

Of the four Republicans examined, only former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney came close to being in positive territory. Rhode Islanders were basically split about him, at 41% favorable and 42% unfavorable.

Still, Obama would defeat Romney by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup here. And the local landslides for Obama would be even larger against Mike Huckabee (56%-31%), Newt Gingrich (60%-27%) and Palin (65%-24%).

That’s partly because Obama is still in decent shape among Rhode Island’s strongly Democratic electorate, despite the state’s double-digit unemployment rate. His approval rating was 53% in this month’s PPP survey, compared with 45% in our WPRI 12 poll last September. But his numbers are lower among the state’s independents, at 48% approval and 43% disapproval.

Obama defeated John McCain 63%-35% in Rhode Island two years ago. The only places where he won a larger share of the vote were Washington, D.C. (93%), Vermont (68%) and New York (63%).

The automated telephone survey of 544 Rhode Island voters was conducted Feb. 16 to Feb. 22 by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated firm in Raleigh, N.C. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Last week the company released its findings for next year’s Senate race and local approval ratings.

(photo: Wikipedia/Therealbs2002)

The Rhode Island Board of Elections is gearing up to spend some money on new voting machines – but taxpayers won’t have to pay for nearly as many if lawmakers lift the cap they’ve put on the size of polling precincts.

Right now, state law requires that each polling place serve no more than 1,900 voters – but school gyms, the most common voting venue, could handle thousands more than that. Robert Kando, the election board’s executive director, tells me a bill will be introduced in the new General Assembly session to eliminate the mandate.

Based on the 1,900 limit, the board will need to lease 650 machines to have enough for all 550 or so precincts, plus backups in case some of them break down, at an estimated cost of $1.25 million a year. But that amount could be reduced if lawmakers allow larger polling places.

The savings wouldn’t stop there, either, Kando says. Fewer precincts means fewer deliveries of ballots and machines; fewer poll workers to be trained and paid; fewer technicians to fix broken machines, plus less maintenance; and fewer police officers to check in on polling days.

Cities and towns have to pay for many of those costs, even though precinct sizes are set by the state. ”By having fewer precincts, it has a dramatic effect on the savings for the state of Rhode Island and for the local communities,” he said.

Kando also thinks this would be a particularly good time to make the change since the state will also be embarking on redistricting now that we have the latest U.S. Census population numbers.

This sounds pretty sensible to me – but if you think otherwise, leave your counterargument in the comments section.

Should Rhode Island implement runoff elections to make sure candidates receive at least 50% of the vote before taking office?

Gov. Don Carcieri suggested just that to my colleague Tim White in his exit interview earlier this month, and now two Republican state rep-elects say they’ll introduce a constitutional amendment requiring runoffs after the General Assembly convenes next week.

WRNI’s Ian Donnis rightly notes that they face a big uphill battle. But I was also interested in how, exactly, they thought a runoff would work. Would a second election be held shortly after the early November one? Would we have what’s known as an “instant runoff,” where voters rank their preferences and poor performances get eliminated until somebody hits 50%? Something else?

“We really don’t have a preference on how this is achieved,” Rep.-elect Mike Chippendale, one of the two, told me by phone when I put the question to him today. “We just feel strongly that, especially with general officers, the winner should have a mandate, and that’s something that’s [common] all over the U.S. and all over the world.”

One qualm the idea’s opponents are likely to bring up is that holding a second election would cost money, which Chippendale acknowledged. But he said the cost would be minor and worthwhile considering the value of providing a proper mandate for the election victor.

The actual legislation to be introduced by Chippendale and his colleague, Rep.-elect Patricia Morgan, is still being drafted, and he was realistic about its prospects. “Honestly, we’re two freshman Republicans,” he said, “and we’re pretty pragmatic about how things are going to go.”

I asked our Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming what he thought about Gov. Carcieri’s suggestion that Rhode Island should consider adopting runoff elections after Lincoln Chafee won the governor’s office with only 36% of the vote.

“I believe this election was the exception,” Fleming told me in an e-mail. “In most years, a third candidate would only get about 5% of the vote. I do not see this happening very often. … You very seldom get three candidates that all can draw a large number of votes.”

And, he added, “I do not think the General Assembly would be in favor of such an idea.”

You can catch Tim White’s report with Carcieri’s thoughts on runoffs and a potential Senate bid in 2012 during tonight’s 6 p.m. newscast.

In his exit interview with my colleague Tim White, Gov. Don Carcieri made this interesting suggestion:

I don’t know how you govern effectively when you’ve got a little more than a third of the voters that supported you. I think the notion of a runoff, or something, that would at least – whoever is sitting in this seat would feel more comfortable -

White: You think there should be a runoff election?

Yeah, I do. I think it’s a healthier thing for the whole process.

There are many, many ways to structure runoff elections, as this massive Wikipedia article shows. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that Rhode Island implemented a system where, if no candidate gets 50% in the first round of voting, the top two vote-getters would compete head-to-head in a second round.

What that would have meant in the most recent gubernatorial election is that instead of Lincoln Chafee winning the governor’s office with 36% of the vote, he and second-place John Robitaille – who got 34%, and was Carcieri’s candidate – would have gone on to the second round. They would have had to do a few weeks of quick campaigning – we probably would have hosted another debate with just the two of them – before voters headed back to the polls to pick one or the other.

In a runoff, the big question is what happens to the voters who supported other candidates in the first round. About 30% of voters supported someone other than Chafee or Robitaille on Nov. 2. Most of them backed Frank Caprio, a Democrat with a center-right bent, so Robitaille would have had a good shot at picking up a lot of them – though we don’t actually know the composition of Caprio’s 78,896 voters.

A second-round runoff also would have a dramatically different dynamic than the rest of the gubernatorial campaign. The Chafee campaign would have had to scramble to define Robitaille, who had been little-known to voters just a few weeks before the vote. But Robitaille would no longer have been battling Caprio – and, to a lesser extent, Ken Block – on the right. Here’s some of how Robitaille analyzed that dynamic in his interview with me earlier this month:

I think the Ken Block factor was significant, absolutely significant. For him to poll six or seven percent in a seven-way race was definitely a factor. And then when you look at – only 36 percent of the people voted for Linc, who was clearly the only progressive running, and the only one really running completely left of center. The three of us, Block, Caprio and myself, were all clearly running right of center. So when you’ve got three people dividing up 64 percent of the vote, it’s tough for any one of us to win.

Tim will have more highlights from his interview with Carcieri on tonight’s evening news. The full interview will air during a special edition of “Newsmakers” this weekend.

Update: Common Cause Rhode Island’s John Marion writes in to point out that there are a number of other ways to structure a runoff apart from the Louisiana/France-inspired scenario I outlined above.

In 2012, California is moving to a system where it holds one big primary, and the top two vote-winners – regardless of party – compete in the general election. So if the Democrat and Green Party candidates come in first and second in the state’s all-party primary, the Republican won’t be on the ballot in the general.

There’s also instant-runoff voting, where voters rank their preferences numerically on the ballot and then the least-preferred candidates keep getting knocked out until somebody makes it over the 50% mark. So if you were a right-leaning voter who prefers Caprio you might mark your ballot “Caprio 1, Robitaille 2, Block 3, Chafee 4.” That way, if Caprio gets knocked out of the running because not enough people prefer him, you wind up supporting Robitaille, your second-choice, rather than inadvertently helping Chafee.

Quick Update: Looks like turnout was a bit higher than the estimates below, because a significant share of Democratic primary voters chose not to cast a ballot in the AG race. Preliminary estimates from the Secretary of State’s office are 107,327 votes cast in the Democratic primary and 19,719 in the Republican one, for 127,046 combined.

That could push statewide turnout closer to 18%. More to come.

Second Update: Secretary of State’s office not 100% sure those early numbers are right. Seems high for more than 12,000 Democratic voters to opt out of choosing a candidate in the AG’s race. For what it’s worth, I agree. More to come.

Final Update: Nope, Board of Elections says those figures were correct – there was a lot of “undervoting” in the Democratic attorney general’s race, meaning voters picked up a ballot but did not choose a candidate in that contest. My full report on turnout is up on the main site.

Original Post: Only about 16% of Rhode Island’s registered voters showed up at the polls for Tuesday’s primary, despite high-profile races for attorney general and Congress, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations. If accurate, that would be the lowest off-year turnout in 12 years.

There were 94,851 votes cast statewide in the Democratic primary for attorney general, and another 18,603 cast in the Republican primary for governor, for a combined total of 113,454 in the two major party primaries. That’s out of about 710,000 registered voters who were eligible to participate in the election, according to figures the Projo published earlier this week.

Caveats: some voters could have failed to cast ballots in those two races, although those appeared to be the most popular of the various contests; figures can change as final counts are completed; and I don’t know whether the Projo’s 710,000 figure for the number of potential voters includes individuals who were not eligible because they registered after the Aug. 14 deadline for the primary.

If turnout was roughly 113,500, it would be right around the number predicted by Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming, who predicted 120,000 late last week but reduced his forecast slightly to 115,000 yesterday. Color me impressed.

That said, it’s rather sad that only 16% of registered voters cast ballots in the election, even if it was expected. That would be the lowest turnout in a non-presidential year since 1998, when just under 14% showed up. (In 2006, the year of Chaffee v. Laffey, 23.4% of voters turned out, while in 2002, when York and Whitehouse battled for the gubernatorial nod, 22.5% came out.)

Interestingly, the 1st Congressional District race that got so much attention did not attract that many more voters than the quieter 2nd District race. Preliminary figures show 56,724 votes were cast in the 1st District contest, won by David Cicilline, while 43,638 were cast in the 2nd District, where U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin was nominated for another term.

In Providence, 23,801 votes were cast in the Democratic primary for mayor won by Angel Taveras, who faces only token opposition in November.

By my math, that would put turnout in the city’s Democratic primary at a fairly robust 27%, since about 89,000 Democratic and unaffiliated voters were eligible to cast a ballot in that contest. That would be nearly as strong a turnout as in 2002, when 28% of eligible voters cast a ballot in the first Democratic primary won by David Cicilline.

Secretary of State Ralph Mollis’ aides are still tabulating an official estimate of last night’s turnout. I’ll update this post once I hear from them.

Answer: Almost certainly. The real question is, who and how many?

I took a look at the potential for voter turnout to play a decisive role in tomorrow’s primaries for Congress, mayor and other offices in a new story on WPRI.com:

Fewer than 120,000 of Rhode Island’s 702,000 registered voters are likely to cast a ballot on Tuesday, with under 100,000 in the Democratic primary and under 20,000 in the Republican one, according to Eyewitness News political analyst Joe Fleming.

If Fleming’s prediction is correct, statewide voter turnout on Tuesday would be around 17 percent. “I do not see a very high turnout in Tuesday’s primary,” he said.

Later on in the piece, I noted something that has always fascinated me – the sometimes incredibly-small number of voters who back the winner in a hard-fought, low-turnout election. I used the example of Myrth York in 2002, which was actually a relatively good year for primary turnout:

York won that contest, which showed just how few voters it can take to win a primary even when turnout is relatively robust. She received 46,806 votes, only 926 more than Whitehouse.

Since a total of 600,996 voters were eligible to cast a ballot in the primary that year – 240,959 Democrats and 360,037 independents – that meant York emerged victorious with the support of just 8 percent of eligible voters.