Voters resoundingly reject proposal to merge Evansville, Vanderburgh County governments

Reflecting a determined effort by consolidation opponents to reach voters on the ground, the referendum question was rejected by a margin of nearly 2-to-1.

As hard as opponents worked to reach the casual voters, no one knew how to quantify the impact they would have on a ballot question with numerous complex implications for local government. Their presence was bound to dilute the influence of activists on both sides, whose votes would have been magnified in an off-year election with its smaller voter pool.

Yasmin Cruz, an 18-year-old University of Southern Indiana student casting her first ballot, came out to support Democratic President Barack Obama for re-election.

“I like his proposals for students,” Cruz said as she waited at the end of a long line at the Washington Square Mall vote center.

But Cruz hadn’t heard much about the first item on her ballot, the consolidation referendum.

“Sometimes I feel they don’t have a system with this,” she said, searching for words to describe her feelings about local government.

Cruz said she would vote for consolidation, on the general principal that government should be streamlined.

Kelli Rausch, a single mother with three children ages 3 to 13 and a full-time job, doesn’t have much time to spend on parsing through the various claims and counterclaims of opposing sides in a local referendum.

“I should have studied up on it,” Rausch, 36, said at Washington Square.

Speaking off-the-cuff as she stood in line, Rausch said her first instinct was to support consolidation in the name of making local government simpler — as long as the property tax burden would be fairly distributed.

Rausch recalls voting in the 2010 off-year election, but she acknowledged she is more likely to turn out for a presidential election.

The casual voters — those drawn to the polls by presidential races — were always going to be the wild card in this year’s consolidation referendum. There is no template. The 1974 vote in which Vanderburgh County voters defeated the VandiGov merger plan came in an off-year election.

Richard Nixon had been re-elected president two years earlier — but the 1974 off-year election came at the time of Watergate and widespread public distrust of government.

The difference between turnout in recent off-year elections in Vanderburgh County and presidential election years is dramatic.

The 2010 off-year election brought 50,952 voters — 37 percent of registered voters — out to cast ballots. The numbers were higher in the 2006 off-year election — 56,279 voters, 45 percent of the total.

Many of this year’s casual presidential year-only voters may have lacked enough information about consolidation to cast informed votes. Making a considered decision was made more difficult by the fact that the referendum question did not offer voters the “ballot cue” of party identification on which so many of them depend.

It is likely that thousands of casual voters made their decision about consolidation in the voting booth or shortly before they voted.

“People who are there for other reasons are confronted with this major question, and because it’s first on the ballot, my guess is that the majority of them will take a position — perhaps not a carefully considered position,” said Robert Dion, a political scientist at the University of Evansville.

“And their votes will count as much as anyone else’s. But that’s part of the bargain with democracy.”

Speaking before Tuesday’s balloting ended, Dion said he still believes the nation benefits from having “the biggest possible vote” that only a presidential election year can deliver.

“In some respects, you can say that this arrangement allows for the best possible reflection of the will of the people,” he said.

That suits Bruce Ungethiem, co-chairman of Citizens Opposed to Reorganization in Evansville, just fine.

Speaking Tuesday night at CORE’s victory celebration, Ungethiem attributed the consolidation proposal’s defeat to nearly 100 dedicated volunteers and the common sense of voters.

“We had a lot of grass roots folks, a lot of people that read the plan and said, ‘This is not good for the community,’” he said. “They went out and said, ‘Let’s do something. Let’s be effective in our community,’ and they were.”

Outspent by Yes! for Unification by roughly a 3-to-1 margin, consolidation opponents were forced to rely heavily on word-of-mouth and public appearances. They countered the Yes! media and mail campaign by scrounging for votes wherever votes were to be had.

During the campaign, Ungethiem recounted to a reporter that he had touted CORE’s anti-consolidation campaign to two young voters as they arrived at an early voting center.

“The citizens of Vanderburgh County have won the victory; we’re just the agent to make that happen,” he said Tuesday night. “This plan was never good for the county from the start, and we knew that. Now we’ve seen that most of the voters of Vanderburgh County have agreed with us on that, so we’re happy with that.”

Consolidation supporters, who supplemented their media campaign with grass roots activities of their own, accepted the result with resignation.

“It appears that voters are happy with the direction of city government, and personally, that’s a good thing,” said Mayor Lloyd Winnecke, a leader voice in the Yes! campaign.

“It could be said, I think easily, that we didn’t make a strong enough case to the voters. We’ll just step back and evaluate the messaging and go on from there. Tomorrow we’ll get back to work, trying to make Evansville an even more vibrant city.”