Posted on 08/20/2014 8:24:33 AM PDT by mandaladon
he proposal to enter L.A. voters into a cash prize lottery, for the sake of increasing turnout, is easy to attack on numerous fronts.
My first reaction to last week's recommendation by the L.A. City Ethics Commission?
Horror.
Or maybe it wasn't horror so much as anger that anyone would come up with such a sad little gimmick. Throughout history, people have sacrificed their lives for the right to vote, and now we have to offer jackpots to shake people out of their laziness and apathy?
"How DUMB!!!" one reader posted on the story by my colleague David Zahniser.
"Really???!!!" said another.
Aside from the problem of turning a civic duty into a commercial gambit, there's the obvious problem of attracting voters who don't know a councilman from a crossing guard. So I called Nathan Hochman, the ethics commission president, to hear his justification for a lottery.
"We are in a crisis," said Hochman, citing a steep decline in turnout for local elections between 2001 and 2013, when about 75% of the city's registered voters skipped the election won by Mayor Eric Garcetti.
"In a representative democracy, you want everybody to have a piece of ownership about their city government," Hochman said. And when too few people take part, "the system fails."
A commission formed by Garcetti and council President Herb Wesson had already looked at fixes, including the aligning of low-turnout local elections with higher-turnout state and national elections in even-numbered years. Another recommendation was for extended voting times, in which voters might have more places to cast ballots and several days to do so.
Those are fine ideas, Hochman said, but it'll take years to implement them. The commission wanted to try something in the interim, on a trial basis.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Constitutional????
This is something right out of the movie Network.
Once these things get up an going they are very hard to stop
It’s just a scheme for rats as most government giveaways are
Attracting voters who don’t know a councilman from a crossing guard.
Welcome to Los Angeles.
Sometimes, I'm not even in the 5%. When it comes to school board elections, I simply vote for whomever is NOT endorsed by the local educrat union. If there are more non-endorsees than slots available, I simply vote for the non-endorsees who I think are most likely to win.
A cousin of mine is a well-respected M.D. He actually takes the time to research all the candidates before he votes. I respect that. If more people did the same, libtards would be relegated to the lunatic fringe where they belong.
This is so nutty.
I have an idea to increase participation in L.A. municipal elections that won’t cost an extra penny:
Have municipal elections coincide with presidential election years.
There. Problem solved. The idea is so simple, it will never be embraced.
I was thinking "Idiocracy."
If you don't register to vote, your name goes in the jury pool. Currently it's the other way around.
This may actually hurt conservative candidates in such a politically liberal municipality.
“If you don’t register to vote, your name goes in the jury pool. Currently it’s the other way around. “
Yeah, that’s the ticket! Ruin both the vote and the jury pool. How’d you like to be tried by 12 illegal Mexicans?
More incentive to vote early and often.
So no fiscally responsible candidate could cancel this white elephant.
FREEE STUFFF FREE STUFF
“The defense attorneys would love it- aimless, malleable, ambivalent jurors are easily led astray.”
I’ve been challenged off every jury for which I’ve ever been sent. Defense lawyers want people who are “good with awards for pain and suffering,” and they don’t look for anyone who has an opinion about anything. Result: old people and welfare mothers. Was on a criminal grand jury once for a week. Now that’s a whole different ballgame. You really get a clearer picture of the underbelly of our society there.
I live in L.A.
When you go to vote a municipal election, it is absolutely dead at the polls. I can remember many times voting in a municipal election and I was the only one at the polls voting. I can see the frustration of city officials at the abysmal turnout. Now that certainly does give MY vote a lot more leverage. But it really doesn’t make much of a difference anyways. The LA Mayor and City Council are overwhelmingly liberal in any event so I don’t see how it could get much worse than it is already.
If they really wanted to maximize voter turnout, all they need to do is schedule municipal elections in presidential and midterm election years. Currently municipal elections are scheduled in the odd years thus guaranteeing an extremely low turnout.
I suspect the only reason they don't sync the elections is that there are probably special interests who believe or possibly have found that it's easier to get a bond measure through or a proposition passed if the elections occur in off-years or during primaries or special elections.
Yup. I really don’t care about the turnout in my Communist city. The lower the turnout the better. Gives my vote more weight with the lower turnout.
I’m just saying if the local yo-yos who run our city government want to see a higher turnout in municipal election they should have them in the even years to correspond with the presidential and midterm elections as opposed to all of these perfectly ridiculous ideas to bribe the voters to come to the polls.
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