Despite high voter turnout, democracy is not fully alive in Santa Monica.
More than a third of local voters didn’t fully weigh in on last week’s race for four open seats on the Santa Monica City Council, an analysis of election returns shows.
Though some voters apparently cared only about state and national races, others didn’t cast all four votes in the local council race because doing so may have hurt their favored candidates, said Amy Connolly of Santa Monica Ranked Voting, which examined all 66 voting precincts in Santa Monica.
“What’s wrong with the system that we have now is we have no assurance that the results give a fair representation for everyone,” she said. “And people are compelled to vote strategically, so that they’re not necessarily encouraged to cast all of the votes allotted to them.”
Connolly’s group is pushing City Hall for an alternative style of voting where residents rank candidates in order of preference. The group hopes to make extinct a practice known as bullet voting, where residents pick just one candidate in order to limit the votes a competitor receives.
Bullet voting has a controversial history. Opponents say it allows sophisticated groups to manipulate elections. Proponents say it’s effective and legal.
Preferential voting already is used for national races in Australia and Ireland, and local races in Cambridge, Mass., and New York City, according to Steven Hill, an analyst from the nonprofit organization Center for Voting and Democracy. Last week, San Francisco used a ranked voting system to hold an instant runoff in its board of supervisors race, thereby saving the city from its usual costly and protracted runoff process.
The Santa Monica Ranked Voting study found residents of two local neighborhoods consistently undervoted more than elsewhere. Citywide, 37 percent of residents under-voted, but in the Pico and Wilshire- Montana neighborhoods, that number jumped to 40 percent and 42 percent, respectively.
In one Pico neighborhood precinct, that number jumped even higher, to 51 percent. That precinct was one of a handful not carried by City Councilman-elect Bobby Shriver. It was taken instead by Maria Loya, a Pico neighborhood activist who last summer was bullet-voted onto a slate backed by Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, a powerful tenant group with deep ties to City Hall.
The percentages were calculated by comparing the number of ballots cast with the total number of possible votes. The figures are not exactly accurate, as it’s not immediately clear if a voter skipped the council section completely or if partial voters picked one, two or three candidates. Still, Connolly said at a bare minimum nearly a quarter of Santa Monica residents undervoted, and likely many more. The percentages cited were a best estimate that took into account all the various factors, she added.
Under the preferential voting model, candidates could rank each candidate on the ballot. Once it had been determined if the voter’s first-choice candidate either would be elected or didn’t have a chance of garnering enough votes, the second-choice candidate would be considered.
While the model would nullify the power of a bullet vote, it also could confuse voters, said Robert Stern of the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies.
“Most people would not cast a ballot all the way down,” said Stern, a former 15-year resident of Santa Monica who still follows local politics. “It would slow things down and voters would not be happy about that. It’s hard enough choosing the four you have to vote for. Can you imagine trying to decide whether to rank a candidate 15th or 16th? Who cares at that point?
“I think for Santa Monica, the way they run the election now, citywide and you vote for four, it’s much shorter. I’m not sure it would change things or provide that much more of an advantage to the system.”
Hill countered that voters would not have to rank every candidate on the ballot. Voters could rank only four and be sure that their second-, third-and fourth-choice candidates wouldn’t undermine their first choice. However, Hill admits the biggest challenge would be educating voters on how to use the system.
As a result, Connolly said the group aims to give preferential voting an unofficial test run in the next local election, alongside the traditional system. Sometime in the next few months, Santa Monica Ranked Voting plans to ask the City Council to study the matter further. Some 33 residents, including some elected leaders, are on the group’s mailing list and many meet for monthly meetings.
“We’re hoping that maybe the council will vote to put the issue on the ballot eventually,” Connolly said. “We’re very encouraged that Santa Monica should be ready to consider choice voting in the next couple of years.”
Undervoted Percentages of voters who didn’t cast all four of their votes in last week’s City Council race, by neighborhood: North of Montana 30.7% Ocean Park 35.1% Pico neighborhood 39.7% Sunset Park 31.7% Wilshire/Montana 41.7% (Source: An analysis of election returns performed by Santa Monica Ranked Voting.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 10, 2004. Read the original PDF.