Zero In-Person Voting Diminishes Participation, Interest, Credibility, & Confidence in This Badly Flawed Process
By Nick Antonicello
Could you imagine as a candidate for office that you were responsible for signing up and verifying voters, and then compel them to register for a ballot and hope that they vote?
For that is the half-baked logic of LA city officials, specifically DONE, Empower LA and the LA City Clerk’s office by not offering same day, in-person voting, but rather leaving the qualification process to volunteers to register stakeholders even though that information already sits in the City Clerk’s office in the form of the existing voter roll!
In Los Angeles, it is easier to vote for the US Presidency then it is to vote for a community officer on a 21-member local advisory board here in Venice.
The question is obvious.
The question is why?
As of this writing, only 242 individuals have bothered to sign-up here in Venice, and many of those will not cast a ballot. To put this into perspective, the population of Venice is roughly 35,000 people. Is this really a concerted effort to depress stakeholder turnout by the very people whose job it is to offer a valid and credible voting platform?
Neighborhood Councils are the closest form of government to the people.
While they are advisory bodies, who advocate for their communities with City Hall on important issues like development, homelessness, and emergency preparedness, neighborhood councils are part of the Los Angeles City government, and have annual budgets funded by taxpayer dollars.
Neighborhood Council board members are in fact elected city officials who are members of their local communities, but they donate their time as volunteers.
Would it be a municipal budget buster to offer these hard-working advocates a nominal stipend for their time and energy?
The Neighborhood Council system was established in 1999 as a revision to the Los Angeles City Charter, as a way of ensuring that the LA government remains responsive to the different needs and lifestyles of Los Angeles’ rich variety of communities.
There are currently 99 Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles, each serving about 40,000 people per body.
With no same day voting, it will take weeks to tabulate results and these new members won’t be seated until July leaving a long “Lame duck” session for the outgoing members. And why are these elections treated like a second-class democracy?
Why doesn’t the LA City Clerk simply mail every registered voter a ballot, like every other election and why must one be vetted to vote in these elections, yet homeless individuals are held to a lesser standard?
If one is not a resident of Venice, but qualifies as a stakeholder, doesn’t it make much more sense to have those finite number of individuals be vetted versus the entire voter population of 35,000?
Why is this system bluntly speaking, ass backwards?
It is far more responsible for the City Clerk to conduct these neighborhood council elections all on the same day at the same time and use the voter registration system as the primary source of participation. For if thousands of voters participated versus hundreds, these volunteer boards would flex much more influence and power with the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, a detached body of embedded politicos earning some $300,000 annually as the most highly compensated elected body at the municipal level in the United States today!
The level of participation and turnout in Venice will be anemic and embarrassing thanks to those responsible for this colossal error in logic or judgement!
Placing a price on grass roots democracy in the form of a third-rate election process that seems intentionally designed to depress voter expression is in fact democracy denied. For how one can claim to represent Venice or any neighborhood when one could be elected with just dozens of votes because city officials are politically tone deaf, unable to distinguish the trees from the forest?
Legislative action is required to right this inherent wrong so that the neighborhood council process can truly represent and prosper versus intentionally die on the vine by incompetent municipal bureaucrats nestled like squirrels in City Hall.
Nick Antonicello is a thirty-two-year resident of the neighborhood who exclusively covers the actions and deliberations of the Venice Neighborhood Council. Have a take or a tip on all things Venice? Contact him via e-mail at nantoni@mindspring.com.
