The most trenchant analysis of this month’s primary election results didn’t come from California’s certified media punditry and its blather about angry voters, but from my friend and former colleague Mark Paul of the New America Foundation, who offered a much more disturbing read.

On the morning after the election, he wrote in his blog, the papers were “full of stories telling us what the voters said on Tuesday. To which I have to ask, what voters?

“The real story of the Tuesday elections is that voters have given up on believing in democracy under California’s current electoral system.”

Almost seventy percent of California’s voters —nearly 12 million of some 17 million registered voters -- nine times the number who voted for Meg Whitman, five times the number who voted for Prop 14 —“kissed off the election.” http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/status.htm. Although there were no major contests at the top of the Democratic primary, even turnout in Republican areas was dismally low: 16 percent in Riverside County; 25 percent in San Bernardino County.

Paul, co-author with Joe Mathews of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, also points out parenthetically that: ...

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