10:15am | The late and celebrated Kansas City Star columnist Bill Vaughan once said:
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”
One can only imagine what Mr. Vaughan might have said after the City Clerk posted the unofficial results of Long Beach’s most recent municipal primary election. lbpost.com readers can review the results of that election here.
As far as possible, I hope to stay out of the weeds of this topic. My lbpost.com colleagues Greggory Moore and Keith Higginbotham have each now posted what I believe are excellent columns related to their perspectives of many of the specifics of our city’s recent election.
Instead, I intend that the focus and perspective of this column be a bit broader yet also a bit more specific. I’m going to discuss why I think our current method of selecting individual government representatives and approving many of our public policies could well be failing us here in Long Beach or, perhaps put more accurately, how we, as voters, may well be failing our adopted method.
As a government, our fine City of Long Beach is a smaller and more local reflection of our nation. As a municipality we have agreed to abide by the State Constitution (City Charter, Art. 1, Section 109) and, through that, the US Constitution (California Constitution Art 3, Section 1.)
Thus we, in Long Beach, hold periodic free and open elections in accordance with State Elections Code Section 1301 to select some of our government representatives and to make decisions about some of our broader reaching public policies, particularly those that involve a significant allocation of public funds. The entire premise of holding such elections is that in the relationship between the People their government, it is the People, as represented by a majority of the electorate, who are sovereign.
The electorate is loosely defined as “the body of qualified voters.” To be a “qualified voter” in Long Beach one must be: a United States citizen, a resident of California, not in prison or on parole for the conviction of a felony, and at least 18 years of age at the time of the election. To vote in a given Long Beach election a qualified voter must have registered no later than 15 days beforehand.
These are some of the statutory specifics as to how we, the People, reserve to ourselves the right to determine who will represent us in government and how we, as a society, will make decisions about certain public policy issues that come before us.
Now for some specifics of a different sort:
Long Beach’s population is currently estimated at 461,564 (City website). According to the last completed census (in 2000), those residents 18 years of age or over comprised 70.8% of the city’s population. Applying that percentage to the current published population we can estimate, within a reasonable margin of error, that about 326,787 current city residents are 18 or over.
According to the City Clerk’s Office, there are 238, 294 registered voters in Long Beach. This means that about 88,493 residents who are 18 or over (just over 27%) are either ineligible to register to vote or have not bothered to do so. Over one quarter of our city’s adult population is not registered to vote and, so cannot directly participate through the electoral process in the decisions we, as a community, make about our city government. According to “unofficial” numbers from the City Clerk’s Office, 34,976 registered voters in Long Beach (or 14.68%) cast a vote of one sort or another in the election recently held.
In summary, then, an estimated 73% of 18+-year-old Long Beach residents have registered to vote and, of those, only 14.68% bothered to cast a vote of some kind on April 13th.
So, here’s my question: Why would 85.32% of our adult population go to the trouble to register to vote and then not bother to actually, you know, vote?
My friends, I believe these statistics alone should serve to shake our collective consciousness. But if they somehow do not, here’s one more to consider:
According to these estimates, in the aggregate, a mere10.5% of our city’s total estimated adult population just made some very important decisions about Long Beach city government. A mere 10.5% of us cared enough to walk or bicycle or drive to our local polling places, or to mail an envelope, to vote in our local election. Think about that for a moment.
10.5% of us just made what could prove to be critically important local government decisions for the other 89.5% of us.
In one city precinct of 709 registered voters, one person exercised their franchise and cast his or her vote for our Mayor, City Attorney, City Auditor and City Prosecutor.
One voter. That works out to 0.14% of the registered voters in that precinct.
So my dear readers, the next time you feel unhappy with this or that public policy, this or that public official, or the allocation of this or that amount of public funds; the next time you are annoyed by the crumbling condition of our city infrastructure or you feel our government seems to be becoming less and less responsive to, or reflective of, the People, as expressed by a majority of the electorate our government is intended to represent, please recall these abysmal and, to me, thoroughly embarrassing voter turn out numbers from this election recently passed.
And in recalling those numbers, consider this critically important fact of self-government in a free and civil society that is rightly constrained by the rule of law:
It is not government’s responsibility to remain, at all times responsive to and reflective of our public policy desires or to remain ethical and fiscally sound. No, my friends, the responsibility is ours to keep government that way.
Various social scientists, political experts and other talking heads offer many lengthy and often esoteric-sounding explanations of why they believe we, the People, are having such a terrible time of meeting our obligations in this critical area of self-government. For me, it is all so much excuse making.
The most common excuse is that many of us have become disillusioned with government in general. In this scenario, government is failing us at so many levels that many are choosing to no longer participate.
My response: People aren’t opting out because government is sometimes failing us. Government is sometimes failing us because people are opting out. Please recall where the original and ultimate responsibility lies in the relationship between the People and their government.
The next most common excuse is that it’s sometimes just too difficult to vote. In this scenario people are just to busy or too mobile or the polling place isn’t close enough or the ballot is too complicated that it’s just too much trouble.
My response: With local polling places and direct and mail-in and absentee balloting produced in several different languages, it really can’t get much easier to cast a vote than it is today. This is not to say that voting couldn’t be made still easier.
I’ve advocated passionately, for some time now, that we if we can devise a way to walk on the moon and send rovers skittering about across Mars, we can surely find a secure and reliable manner in which to vote, right on our PC’s or laptops or notebook computers or our smart phones, right in the comfort of our own homes or, for that matter, wherever in the world we happen to be at the time. I believe that if we, as a society, commit to accomplishing this that it can be done and it shouldn’t take another President with incredible vision to get it done:
“We choose to vote via the Internet. We choose to vote via the Internet in this decade…”
But, sadly, the day of reliable and secure Internet voting has not yet come and these inarguable facts remain:
We cannot meet our responsibilities to ourselves and to our community in this regard if we do not actively and intelligently participate in our government. Of all of the ways that exist in which we can participate in our government, the single most important and effective way is to register to vote and then, having done so, to vote intelligently in each and every election in which it is our very great privilege to have the opportunity to participate.
I very much welcome your questions and your comments.