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Forget school board, water district races, and the like; they suffer from even lower turn-out than the City Council races do as they happen in odd-numbered years in November.
Why are SCV voters so apathetic about local elections? Why don't we vote?
I have my own theory, in two parts.
Part 1:Things are, in general, pretty good up here. The City is in the black, the schools have a good reputation and help sell homes, and, in general, things are affordable and life is relatively good here. Why rock the boat? Ignorance is bliss and as long as the City or your local school doesn't do something too stupid, you have no reason to vote or get involved in local politics.
Part 2: Along with that, many residents of the SCV are only staying here temporarily. They move to Santa Clarita to raise a family, then depart when their kids go off to college. In the 10-20 years they live here, they're focused on building their careers, raising their families, and sacrificing their time as they commute to and from jobs in the LA area.
For many, the SCV is just a place they rest their heads at night, a quiet, safe place where they can raise their kids. As long as the premises in Part 1 remain true, they see no reason to get involved in local politics or vote in elections And by the time they've successfully raised their kids and retired and thus have time for local politics, they've moved out of the SCV or retired somewhere else. They're not invested in the future of the SCV- why bother getting involved if you're just going to move away after the kids go to college? (off-topic but I believe this explains the reason we only have one cemetery and one hospital in a valley of 250,000 people. Few get old and die here).
Put another way, the vast majority of voters in the SCV have tacitly outsourced their power to influence local public policy to the 10-15% who actually do vote. And the inverse is true: the 80% who don't vote seem to implicitly trust that their political, social, and economic values are represented well enough locally that they don't have to vote.
And, in general, they're right. Our local districts, the City, and water agencies don't do much to rock the boat or upset things.
Until now. In the wake of the Stephen Winkler revelations, SCVers are going all sackcloth and ashes, mourning their lack of participation in local governance, the same governance that has immensely more power over them, their property, and their economic/social interests than Barack Obama or the Congress or State house does.
And they're promising not to let it happen again.
It only took 1,700 votes to get Winkler elected. It will take approximately 5 times that amount to recall him (10,000 ballots or petitions or whatever) which is approaching City Council ballot totals (13,000 ballots cast in the last election I believe). There are some tens of thousands of registered voters in the Saugus District, so you'd think it'd be easy, but it won't be. It's going to require a herculean effort on the part of SUSD residents to recall Winkler.
Incidentally, I can't think of a better way to demonstrate what can/could happen in the future if voters continue to outsource their power to others than by linking to a dystopian short story that is among my all time favorites. If you like thinking about things like this and like sci fi, then check out "Resistance," by Tobias Buckell, a short story about a future techno-democracy where voters have outsourced their power to computer programs. Here's a tease, you can read the whole thing online here:
“There are problems with a techno-democracy,” muttered Stanuel. “If you’re a purist, like we were, you had to have the citizenry decide on everything.” The sheer amount of things that a society needed decided had almost crushed them.Every minute everyone had to decide something. Pass a new law. Agree to send delegates to another station. Accept taxes. Divvy out taxes. Pay a bill. The stream of decisions became overwhelming, constantly popping up and requiring an electronic yes or no. And research was needed for each decision.“The artificial intelligence modelers came up with our solution. They created intelligences that would vote just as you would if you had the time to do nothing but focus on voting.” They weren’t real artificial intelligences. The modelers took your voting record, and paired it to your buying habits, social habits, and all the other aspects of your life that were tracked in modern life to model your habits. After all, if a bank could use a financial profile to figure out if an unusual purchase didn’t reflect the buyer’s habits and freeze an account for safety reasons, why couldn’t the same black box logic be applied to a voter’s patterns?
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