In fact, you are more likely to be in The Twilight Zone, with Rod Sterling guiding you back to the halcyon days of Santa Clarita in 1987. This was the year before I arrived in Santa Clarita, but by 1988 the area was still bucolic enough to be compared to Mayberry or Brigadoon. Somehow, over a period of a little over two decades, Santa Clarita has on its biannual city election day been turned into a tan-color ghost town, less democratic in its municipal voting than any counterpart Iraqi city today.
In 1987, there were no entrenched incumbents, and everyone running for office seemed to have fearless ideas on how to make Santa Clarita better. Included among these candidates were Howard “Buck” McKeon, who was given the distinction of sorting things out the newly-named city’s first mayor. More recently he has been sorting things out on an international scale in his senior positions on the House of Representatives education and armed forces committees.
More than 20,000 voters turned out that first municipal election in a city that is only about two thirds of today’s population. In more recent city elections, with a city population that is much bulged in what has been the fastest growth seen in Los Angeles County, the city elections have had only about half as many voters turn in ballots.
During a time when our courageous soldiers in Iraq have helped create conditions where there is a general eagerness to vote, an Iraqi city the size of Santa Clarita would be expected to turn out much more than half of its qualified voters. Surely no Iraqi city would have as low a turnout as Santa Clarita’s most recent elections. If it did, there would be red flags all over the place warning about a local breakdown in democracy.
Why then is the city election voting in Santa Clarita so low?
One reason obviously is that every Santa Clarita city election is a “special election” in terms of its time and cost. Special elections are not aligned with state and national voting, and so many people do not recognize it having the importance of a national election.
Probably in every place but Santa Clarita, special elections are condemned by local Republicans who see in them a waste of taxpayer’s money and positioned to create unrepresentative, special-interest dominance.
Another reason for low local voting in Santa Clarita is that the local city and newspaper machinery does not make the population aware of the voting and time and place to vote as does the typical American city. In fact, city election days in Santa Clarita don’t look much different than any other weekdays.
Independent voters usually wait until Election Day to vote because they want to assess the candidates even on the final day. But by Election Day in Santa Clarita if you are an independent you might have to resort to calling the League of Women Voters to find out where you can vote. A lot of independents are just too independent to resort to that. The result is that political-action-committee (PAC) absentee ballots step in to dominate the vacuum.
All of these conditions favor entrenched incumbents, especially the discouragement of the swing-voting independent vote on Election Day.
In any case, I don’t think that city voting is low because the Santa Clarita population is slothful. If the people in the city were distinctively slothful in any other way I might more easily buy that explanation.
I think that instead there are a lot of city people and newspaper people in Santa Clarita who fear they might possibly lose some of their present advantages if city voting became too inclusive and volatile and challenger-friendly. So they are less than eager to create conditions where incumbents and the challengers present their cases on a level playing field. A typical example has been reported recently in the Beacon where the City of Santa Clarita attempted to box in the budget of TimBen Boydston into smaller campaign signs so that he couldn’t compete against the larger signs of the incumbents. Like in Las Vegas, the house retains more control of the deck than does the house guest.
The only variable that will change all this will be in the way that solid and serious challengers like David Gauny and TimBen Boydston bring new voters into the mix on Election Day. This entirely new development would have to compete with the usual five or six thousand PAC-generated mail-in ballots that largely represent financial special interests, even outside of Santa Clarita. If Gauny and Boydston can pull this off on April 13, in teamwork with the long-neglected larger population of Santa Clarita, they will surely prove to be qualified to lift their city of Santa Clarita into the next level.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
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