The Beach Boys wished in song that all American women could be California girls. But a coalition trying to improve voting rates wishes they were all Utah women instead.
That's because in the past three elections, 76 percent of eligible women in Utah voted."Utah has the highest women's turnout in the nation," said Irene Natividad, chairwoman of the Women's Vote '96 Project, which launched a campaign Wednesday to encourage more women to vote.
A study using U.S. Census data said Utah women vote at a rate almost a fifth higher than the na-tional average and 45 percent above the rate in Kentucky - which has the lowest percentage of women who vote.
The national average for women voter turnout is 63.8 percent, and in Kentucky it is only 52.5 percent.
The study also said an average of only 8 percent of Utah women who were registered to vote failed to do so in those three elections - compared to a national average of 12.1 percent.
The study did not give reasons why more women in Utah vote - but University of Utah political science professor Matthew Burbank says it may be because of a strong tradition of high voter turnout overall in Utah.
"Ordinarily, there isn't a big difference in turnout between males and females," he said. "But there is a strong tradition of higher turnout in this state."
But Burbank said he was a little surprised the women's turnout was so high "because there hasn't been a strong number of female candidates here."
In the 1984, 1988 and 1992 elections studied, only 1992 had a truly high-profile race with a woman candidate - ironically it involved two of them. That year, former Rep. Karen Shepherd, D-Utah, defeated Rep. Enid Waldholtz, R-Utah, in the 2nd U.S. House District.
Burbank noted that in 1984, Utahns turned out in big numbers to support Ronald Reagan (and gave him the biggest margin of victory in any state). They also turned out in fairly large numbers for George Bush in 1988 (when Utah also gave him his largest margin of victory).
The Vote '96 Project - a coalition of 110 women's groups - said it will begin a campaign of print and TV public service announcements urging more women to vote, form drives to register more women and make Election Day phone calls urging them to vote.
"Seventy-five years after suffragists won women the right to vote, voting is not yet a habit for American women," Natividad said.
"We intend to change that. Women's low voter turnout is a symptom of a much broader problem - a pervasive sense of alienation from government that is more profound now than it was any time in the past," she said.
The drive is especially targeting 10 states: Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Voting: How women voted
Best/worst percentages of eligible women who voted in the past three presidential elections.
1. Utah 76.0%
2. Connecticut 75.7%
3. Wisconsin 75.1%
4. Oregon 74.0%
National average 63.8%
47. South Carolina 55.1%
48. Georgia 54.7%
49. Tennessee 53.8%
50. Kentucky 52.5%
Source: Women's Vote Project '96, based on U.S. Census data.