I think it was Saddam Hussein most famous for being president of a “republic” where the only people who voted were in his inner circle.  Didn’t he say that the rest of Iraq didn’t need to vote because they are happy with the way things were?
            In any case, the official reaction from the city of Santa Clarita was somewhat the same in its 2006 municipal election, when the voting turnout was percentage-wise about where it was in Saddam’s Iraq.  Incredibly the official Santa Clarita reaction was that the city’s contented people didn’t take the trouble to vote because they were satisfied with the way things are.
            The only problem I had with this response is that if contented people indeed don’t vote — leaving it to unhappy souls to decide elections — why did Santa Clarita’s angry people then vote for the incumbents?
            In any case, the 2006 Santa Clarita municipal election was decided by 11,982 people in a city of 79,164 registered voters.  Of these, only 4,663 came to vote on Election Day, the other 7,319 voting on absentee ballots.
            None of the three winning incumbents could woo as few as 6,000 voters in a city where they represent over 175,000 people.
            In comparison, when Santa Clarita was just beginning in 1987 – with only about two-thirds of the current population and no municipal history for background – a total of 20,185 showed up on election day to vote for a city council.  An additional 1,733 used an absentee ballot, a convenient option but still less popular among America’s voting traditionalists.  Yet today, with the city greatly grown and facing many greater crises, we have only half that number voting for our city leaders
            Let me try to convey why Santa Clarita people don’t go out to vote on municipal Election Day based on my last experience.
            I was told to vote in someone’s garage on a street I had never heard of.  In spite of that, I took the trouble to get a new city map that was supposed to include all the new streets in Santa Clarita.  I finally found the house and its spooky-looking garage where I was supposed to vote.  But where were any people?  The only living things I saw on the streets were dogs.
            Surely, I had found the only place in Santa Clarita where I would never send my wife or my daughter.
            However, let’s imagine my possible prosperity was somehow impacted by a city contract.  It could be that someone in my family would be employed under a contract or a subcontract based on a relationship with a City Council member.  That’s a different story.  I might be jumping over electric fences and pushing my family in front of pit bulls to vote for that City Council incumbent then.
            Not that the City Council is trying to make municipal voting difficult by creating obstacles for the average voter, leaving the way clear for the triumph of payoff voting .  It just looks like that in the way the City Council refuses to widen the municipal vote by aligning it with state elections and putting voting areas in public places.
            It doesn’t matter so much to me that the City Council may have created a self-interested system – creating conditions that restrict the elections to interested voters and thus practically insuring perpetual incumbency. But the problem is a “democratic government” that elects a city council representative with the support of only one in 13 registered voters is inherently weak. Ask Cemex.
            Or ask Saddam Hussein.
            Oh I forgot.  There is no asking Saddam anymore. 

Chris Sharp

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