CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Voter Turnout Rate Is State’s Lowest Ever : Participation: Only 32.9% of those registered went to the polls, unofficial count shows. Political scientists say it is part of a decade-long trend across the nation.

Turned off by nasty campaigning, predictable races and dull propositions, California voters visited the polls at a lower rate this Election Day than ever before, election officials said Wednesday, as they decried a dramatically small 32.9% unofficial voter turnout.

Even before Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary, acting Secretary of State Tony Miller predicted a historically low 39.8% turnout, and the Field Poll estimated that only 38% of the state’s 14.2 million registered voters would bother to exercise their voting privileges.

Wednesday’s unofficial turnout rate will probably rise to 37% once all absentee ballots are counted, Miller said. “Still,” he said, “it’s pathetic. Embarrassing. I can’t think of a word strong enough to say how I feel about the lack of participation.”

Southern California voters did very little to help increase the early voting rate; only 29.7% of the registered voters in Los Angeles County voted, and San Bernardino County recorded the lowest unofficial voting rate in the state--27%.

“Going along during the day, I saw certain key precincts with 17% turnout,” said Dan Trumbo, assistant registrar of voters for San Bernardino County. “That’s really low. Being in this business since 1978, it’s very sad to see when people don’t vote.”

Political scientists on Wednesday looked coolly at the numbers and predicted that democracy in California is safe. They said the voting rate, though dismal, is part of a decade-long trend.

“Some voters have become occasional voters,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. “They’ve chosen to vote in general elections but not in the primary elections as regularly. Part of that has to do with the lack of familiarity of the candidates running, especially with an election like yesterday.”

Curtis Gans, director of the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, points to New York’s Democratic primary in 1992 as an indicator of how low voter turnout can get--and how California’s turnout, though bad, is par for the course on a national level.

“When Bill Clinton ran in the Democratic primary in New York, there were 7% of the electorate that voted,” Gans said. “It isn’t terrible what you had there (in California). Given what the stimuli were--one-sided races, no coverage except for newspapers, fuzzed-up issues and a scurrilous campaign on television--it’s not a bad turnout.”

Gans and Bruce Cain, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, both blame increasingly low turnout on the inability of grass-roots organizations and political parties to interest and mobilize their members to vote.

“There was no major mobilization effort launched by any of the campaigns to get people out there,” said Cain. “The Democrats very self-consciously chose to go after the most frequent voters. . . . Increasingly as a way of saving money, people do not mobilize voters unless they need to.”

The worst previous Election Day was the June primary in 1986, according to the secretary of state’s office, when 40.45% of registered voters went to the polls.

On major candidates and major issues, voters hold views very similar to those of their less-interested non-voting neighbors, Gans said. Though he does not believe that low participation would lead to different election results, Gans does fear that it leads to a less healthy political system.

County by county, local officials were much less sanguine than those who follow elections on a state or national level. “We still have absentees to count, but it’s not going to take it up a whole lot,” said Jenny Harrison, deputy county clerk in Ventura County, where turnout was 31.1%. “It’s incredible, unreal, the lowest in history.”

Not everyone was alarmed. Tiny Alpine County, in fact, thinks it can teach the big boys and girls a thing or two about democracy and the exercise thereof. Yes, the latest census counted only 1,113 residents in the wooded county south of South Lake Tahoe. But 745 of those are registered, and 570--or 76.5%, the highest rate in the state--cast ballots.

Alpine County Clerk Karen Keebaugh credits the convenience of an all-mail ballot and the excitement of two hotly contested races for the heavy turnout. But she also points out that her neighbors are no slouches.

“We’re the smallest county in population, but we’re pretty mighty,” Keebaugh said. “We take our voting seriously. We’re really excited.”