One of the big disappointments of Election Day is low turnout.

Compared to other obligations and privileges that the American government bestows upon us – getting a passport, serving on a jury, filing taxes – voting in California is one of the single easiest things to do. Ballots now automatically arrive in your mailbox, even if you prefer to vote in person. Postage is prepaid. As long as your ballot is postmarked by Election Day (this year, Nov. 5), it will still be counted as long as it is delivered within a week. And you can track all of this on an app, choosing to receive a text message or an email when your ballot has been processed.

So we’ve ruled out convenience as a factor in not voting. This year’s elections brought a host of decisions locally and regionally and statewide to voters – and two wildly divergent candidates for president of the United States of America.

And yet, as of the latest report from Monterey County Elections, 3:42pm on Friday, Nov. 8, turnout was just 49.2 percent of registered voters in Monterey County. That means some 109,000 registered voters did not cast a vote this year. (That number is likely to trickle up, but not by much.)

Monterey County’s disappointing turnout is worse than our neighboring counties of Santa Cruz, with 74.8-percent turnout; San Benito, with 63.7 percent; and San Luis Obispo County, which reports 54 percent as of Nov. 8.

It’s also looking worse than Monterey County did in the last two presidential elections, even knowing more ballots will be added to the count. In 2020, turnout was 80.2 percent; in 2016, it was 73.8 percent.

I spoke to one young voter, Diego Doust, who turned 18 in August and voted this year in his first-ever opportunity to do so. He didn’t think much of it, he says – registering was so easy that he doesn’t even remember doing it (maybe at the DMV). He cast his presidential vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, despite knowing she had no real shot at winning and his serious misgivings about Donald Trump and Republicans in general. He understood his first presidential vote ever to be something of a protest vote, knowing it wouldn’t actually tip the scales.

“I don’t really like the Electoral College. It makes it harder for people to have a say in democracy,” says Doust, a high school senior at Robert Louis Stevenson School who lives in Carmel. “If I felt my vote was going to be reflected in the presidential race, I would’ve voted for [Kamala Harris].”

His primary motivator, more than the presidential election, was California’s Proposition 6, which would have eliminated a constitutional provision allowing forced labor of prison inmates. Prop. 6 was a bust at the polls; as of Nov. 12, it was losing by over 839,000 votes, a 6-point margin. Doust is more surprised (so am I) that Prop. 6 lost than he is by Trump’s decisive presidential victory.

I also spoke to a longtime Trump supporter, Thomas Gowing of Salinas, who is also unsurprised that Trump won. “It happened for a reason – it happened for a good reason,” he says. “I think the American people were looking at one of two things: their pocketbook, and crime on the border. I wouldn’t go and have a beer with [Trump], but his policies address that better.”

Gowing, 75, has lived in Monterey County going on 50 years and has seen far more elections than Doust. On the pocketbook topic, he says he had to come out of retirement to drive a limo to support himself – a story many older Americans will relate to, even though economists widely expect Trump’s economic promises to backfire.

On election night, I met a family of four from Seaside who got involved in politics for the first time ever this year, and they joined the watch party at the Monterey County Democratic Party’s Center for Change before the results came in. David Torres and Sharmisa Taylor and their two teenage children, both part of the LGBTQ+ community, had canvassed in Salinas to support Chris Barrera for mayor and Kamala Harris for president.

I checked back in with Torres after the election, in which his local and presidential candidates were walloped. “It was a shock. I felt like I got sucker punched in the gut,” he says. “But we will all go back out and do this again. We will all go back out there. You get knocked down, you don’t stay down.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com