Election Arithmetic and Other Issues

The following letter was sent to the City Council after it voted 4 to 2 to appoint Glean Davis to fill the seat vacated by Herb katz, who died last month after a long bout with cancer.

Dear Mayor Genser and Honorable Council Members:

I watched the video replay item 4A of the city council meeting of Tuesday Feb 24.

I was disappointed by what I saw.  Only one candidate was nominated who had participated in the election.  The public commentary seemed to go largely ignored, and, worst of all, I had the sense that some council members were voting for someone they already knew and who was on their side of the issues.

It was pretty pathetic.  Politics as usual, to put it otherwise.

Before getting to some arithmetic to correct Mr. Genser's use of numbers, I just re-listened to Mr. Genser's statements about his reasoning as to why some "qualified" candidates chose not to run since there were no "open" seats.

By "open" seat, Mr. Genser meant "a seat not occupied by an incumbent virtually guaranteed to be re-elected."

Based on that attitude, there was little point in ANY alternative candidates running for city council, since there were no "open" seats.  That attitude is condescending, frankly.

Perhaps Mr. Genser neglects to consider that were another "qualified candidate" to run whose views are closer to the incumbents' then perhaps the vote would have been diluted enough to make it possible for an alternative non-incumbent to win.

Mr. Shriver did make a valiant attempt to point out the cost of NOT using the democratic process and took a principled position, duly and explicitly ignored by Mr. Bloom.

Suggesting that $150,000 is "expensive" for something that should be the highest priority (democracy) is absurd.  Were there unanimity on the council then, yes, don't spend the $150,000.

There was nothing approaching unanimity.

Now, consider some arithmetic...

Ted Winterer received more than "9%" of the vote.  He received 12,000 votes, which is 24% of the 51,000 voters who voted in the election. (51,000 = 87% turnout of 58000 registered voters)

The "9%" figure used by Genser is a misleading number from the City Web site -- 9% of all 131,000 votes cast where each voter votes for up to 4 candidates.  (The average voter voted for only 2.5 council members.)

The 9% is 9% of that 131,000.  A useless percentage.

A better tabulation is (votes received / 51000 voters voting):

Shriver  24000   48%
Bloom    20000   40%
Genser   19000   38%
Katz     17000   34%
Winterer 12000   24%

So, *every* council member was elected by a minority of the voters.

Mr. Winterer received a vote from one out of four voters. Mr. Katz received one out of three.  Both are respectable in an election having no "open" seats and so many alternative candidates running.

Another statistic worth noting:

Incumbents        80,877
Non-incumbents    50,015

It is hard to know how many of the non-incumbent votes were protest votes by those seeking change.  But had there been additional "qualified" candidates to dilute the vote going to certain of the incumbents, it is well possible Mr. Winterer would have prevailed outright.

Ironically, were there to have been a special election, it is quite probable a candidate friendly to the Genser/O'Connor/Bloom camp would be elected.  Unfortunately, we have been denied the opportunity to find out what the public would have decided.

Sincerely,

Dennis Allard
Santa Monica Resident