This morning I dropped my City of Santa Clarita prepaid envelope in the mail containing my ballot for the City Council race with election day exactly 26 days away. Therefore, no matter WHAT happens in the next 26 days my votes for Harrison Katz, TimBen Boydston and Frank Ferry CANNOT be changed.
I am not alone. Trends since the year 2000 when mail in ballots became the majority (55%) of ballots cast in a local election indicate the proportion of mail in ballots could reach 75% to 80% of the total votes this year. Other voting pattern studies show that 90% of vote by mail voters return their ballots within one week of receiving the ballots, so by Monday, March 22, a high likelihood exists that 68 to 72% of the total votes available will be locked in. Statistics would indicate that we could count the votes then and KNOW the eventual outcome, since the relatively small amount of precinct votes would require a substantial shift of vote distribution from vote by mails to alter the outcome.
So I hearken back to 1998 for the following reasons. That was the year that incumbents Laurene Weste and Frank Ferry first took office taking the seats vacated by retiring incumbents Carl Boyer and Clyde Smyth. In the 1996 election against two returning incumbents Frank and Laurene had come third and fourth respectively, setting up the classic succession when an incumbent left their seat. Assemblyman Smyth would come fourth in this election in an unsuccessful attempt to replace his father, but come roaring back in 2000 to come first. Marsha McLean, the consensus candidate of SCOPE and the Sierra Club in 1998 and current incumbent, would come a distant fifth in the election.
Another nuance in the 1998 election. While vote by mails were still in the minority, they lept 80 PERCENT in absolute numbers from 1996 and have not looked back. Sadly, the convenience of vote by mail (you don’t even need a stamp) has not served to increase participation but merely to cannibalize precinct votes.
Why is this nuance important? Frank Ferry won his seat by garning a dispropotionate amount of vote by mails. One knew this immediately since Lynn Plambeck and several other SCOPE partisans wrote LTE’s and guest columns stating that vote by mail was not really voting and should not be counted.
Other than the obvious question concerning the efficacy of campaigning in this last three to four weeks when many votes are locked in, one must question whether the vote by mail phenomenom has increased the base of “civic minded but uniformed” voter base that seems to number between 3,000 to 5,000. In the past this group would reliably go heavily in favor of the incumbents probably soleley to vague name recognition and civic pride.
Will 2010 be different? Have the challengers thrown enough hammers at the incumbents to cause a shift in the civic minded but uninformed? Does this group even know the hammers have been thrown?
The fact is that no one will be more fascinated than me by one or two challengers unseating incumbents, and I will quickly analyze the numbers to calculate the scale of the shift. After all, I voted for two challengers.
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