Four months to the election!
If you haven't registered, hurry up. Only 134 days until the election.
No, I mean it. You have until midnight to register for the historic Nov. 4 presidential election, with its 12 California propositions and its bevy of taxes and bonds. But vote-by-mail ballots for that one have been out for two weeks, and I’ve moved on. If you live in the city of Los Angeles, the days just before and after election day are the ones that count. Nov. 3 begins the five-day period for candidates for city or school office to file a declaration of intention to run in the March 3, 2009 primary election. And Nov. 5 is the deadline for the City Council to put measures before the voters.
Expect five measures on that ballot, along with the election of mayor, city attorney, controller, eight City Council seats, half the school board and half the community college board. And hope those races aren’t close, or else you’re getting a runoff in May. And, a month after that, you’re most likely getting one of the most important California special elections in recent history, with measures to change the way we do budgeting, and maybe taxing, plus perhaps a measure to bail ourselves out of financial disaster. But if the special election doesn't happen in June, it will happen in November. And then, after a couple months off, it will be time for the state primary – governor, attorney general, and all of that.
You can get a leg up on the March election by checking out Wednesday’s Rules Committee meeting at City Hall, where the panel is expected to sign off on four ballot measures. They are:
1. A solar initiative. Sounds kind of cool, but what is it? It appears to be a union-led effort to get solar panels on top of L.A. rooftops. You can see how the political pieces fit together – you’ve got your labor faction and your environmental faction, and it comes on the same ballot as the re-election of the mayor and a good chunk of the City Council – but is it good for the city? Who will pay?
Here’s David Zahniser’s Times story, a blog post, the motion in front of the committee on Wednesday, and the council file so you can play along at home. Learn your lingo: "Working Californians" is the name of the sponsoring group with ties to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – the DWP employees who just got a hefty pay boost pegged to inflation. And we’re supposed to call this thing the "Los Angeles Basin Solar Power, Green Energy and Jobs Development Mandate." I guess the "basin" part adds some cachet.
2. Fire Department – Independent Assessor. See, it’s like this. Sexual and racial harassment in the Fire Department cost the city so much money (oh, and, by the way, are unlawful and disgusting) that we need to ask voters to create the new position of "independent assessor" to implement reforms. Because we certainly can’t trust the fire chief to do that. Or the mayor who hired him. Or the five-member commission the mayor appoints to oversee the Fire Department. Or the city attorney’s risk management unit that is supposed to make sure this kind of thing never happens. Or the department’s new professional standards division that was set up to track internal complaints.
Here’s a Times brief (although you'll have to scroll to find it), the motion, and the council file. The Daily News story is no longer available, unless you can snoop on its cached version. Regarding lingo, I give extra credit to whoever came up with "assessor." We couldn’t just have "monitor," or "inspector," like everyone else. No, we have to use a word that usually refers to taxes. Since this isn’t a fancy measure that will cost taxpayers a bunch of money, there’s no special name for this one. But I’m kind of hoping they call it “Tennie’s Law.”
3. City Controller. This proposed city charter amendment comes to us courtesy of a territorial squabble between City Controller Laura Chick and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. Chick wanted to audit the workers’ comp programs in the city attorney’s office, and Delgadillo said she had no power to do so; Chick’s people served a subpoena on Delgadillo’s people, who sued Chick’s people, and the City Council came up with this solution: let the people decide. Here’s Phil Willon’s Times story, the motion, and the council file.
At the root of this dispute is yet another dispute – one between Councilman Tony Cardenas and Chick about whether the controller has power to audit gang programs in the mayor’s office. And at the root of that is the 1999 City Charter and its effort to purportedly clarify the controller’s powers. Glad that’s cleared up.
4. Instant Runoff Voting. Good-government types are very excited about this proposal to allow voters to choose not just their favorite candidates, but also their second and third favorites, so that in the event of no candidate winning a majority, points will granted and…. Well, it all gets very complicated. The point is that instead of a runoff, the winner would be decided then and there. And this is important because? Let the IRV enthusiasts explain it. It strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. On the other hand, if we had it now it would mean no May 2009 election. Here's the motion and the file. You may enjoy searching for the Times brief; a follow-up letter to the editor is longer and more detailed.
Friday is the key day for a potential fifth ballot measure –- an initiative that, let’s be frank, will attract far more interest than the four council-sponsored measures. Jamiel’s Law would require police to arrest known gang members who are in the country illegally. Mayoral candidate Walter Moore, together with the parents of slain youth Jamiel Shaw II, are gathering signatures, and Moore tells supporters that he has until Friday to gather 73,963 signatures.
Los Angeles Times photo
Walter: I misunderstood about the Friday "deadline." Thank you for clarifying.
Posted by: Robert Greene | October 21, 2008 at 08:09 AM
Instant runoff voting (also called ranked choice voting) is an important pro-democracy reform. Because it combines a regular election and runoff election into a single election (by letting voters rank their backup choices) it maximizes voter participation. It handles the "spoiler problem" the same as a traditional runoff election, but without the wasted cost, lower turnout and campaign spending of two elections. Voters adapt to it easily. My own city of Burlington, VT uses it. In the first instant runoff election we had higher voter turnout and fully 99.9% of ballots cast in that race were valid. The exit poll conducted by the University of Vermont found that voters overwhelmingly preferred using instant runoff voting to the old system.
Folks can find out more about instant runoff voting at www.fairvote.org
Posted by: Tbouricius | October 21, 2008 at 07:33 AM
Actually, Friday is a goal, not a deadline, per se. The law requires proponents of a City ballot initiative to file around 74,000 signatures from the previous 120-day period.
So Jamiel's Law can make it onto the ballot even if the Shaw Family doesn't have all the signatures Friday. It just means the signatures older than 120 days "expire" and have to be replaced by more recent signatures.
Posted by: Walter Moore | October 20, 2008 at 11:18 PM
Instant Runoff Voting is not a "progressive" idea. It's s a great way to keep independents and third parties from having any effect on elections, and entrenching the two-party duopoly.
It also causes spoiled ballots to be 7 times as common. It necessitates centralized tabulation, since it can't be sub-totaled in precincts. And it may be conducive to the adoption of fraud-prone (electronic) voting machines.
Score voting and approval voting are simpler and vastly superior options, that real reformers should be getting behind.
The New America Foundation is a deeply partisan group whose own writings in support of Instant Runoff Voting have contained patently false and misleading claims. Their platitudes about cost savings and decreased "mudslinging" with IRV are simply unsubstantiated assertion. And in a recent article in American Scientist, which was syndicated on NewAmerica.net, Political Reform Program director Steven Hill claims that score voting and approval voting "would tend to regress to plurality voting."
This is an absolutely preposterous claim that math and voting methods experts have refuted in detail. It is simply a lie. Yet NewAmerica.net proudly carries Hill's article.
Posted by: Clay Shentrup | October 20, 2008 at 06:04 PM