However, local residents just couldn’t be motivated enough to cast their ballots Nov. 8, and the latest available figures from the office of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk show that Long Beach and Signal Hill voters were particularly less engaged in the election process.
As of Dec. 6, LA County reported that it counted 3,544,115 ballots, stating that 69.45 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots. That turnout isn’t that far behind the figures from the General Election in 2012. The County noted that 70.46 percent of the eligible voters participated in 2012. However, that’s a deep contrast to eight years ago, when voters were choosing a brand-new president. When Barack Obama handily won the election in 2008, 81.92 percent of LA County’s eligible voters participated.
Long Beach and Signal Hill voters couldn’t even beat the county turnout. According to the County’s figures, only 63.38 percent of the eligible voters in Long Beach’s 262 precincts decided to fill in their ballot. In Signal Hill, 65.7 percent of the eligible voters in the eight precincts chose to participate.
The figures didn’t really surprise Jeffrey Adler, a political consultant based in Signal Hill. He described voter fatigue and perplexity over the numerous initiatives and state propositions.
“Voter confusion sends people home as well,” Adler concluded.
Last month’s election was one of the most controversial ones in recent memory, and California has been a solid blue state for a long time. Democrats were not united in their allegiances. Local former Bernie Sanders delegate Kristen Cox said that many of the Sanders supporters she knew felt divided.
“The majority,” the Long Beach resident said of the Sanders supporters, “were either planning on voting for Jill Stein, not voting at all, or reluctantly putting their support behind Hillary because they felt she was better than Trump.”
Cox added that no one was passionate about supporting Clinton. After Sanders failed to win the nomination at the Democratic Convention last summer, Cox said that she decided to volunteer much of her time with the Jill Stein campaign. Last week, she just returned from volunteering at the protests around the Dakota Pipeline.
Cox said that she was focusing on progressive values, human rights and environmental issues.
Despite the numerous issues and major contests on the ballot, both locally and nationally, Adler said that there wasn’t enough of a motivation for many voters to head to the polls. Marijuana, he said, wasn’t the cutting-edge issue that would inspire turnout. He added that this was a state that was already very liberal.
Efforts by Krispy Kreme and other restaurants to encourage voter participation by offering free food aren’t new. Sometimes that gimmick could work in a local election, but Adler explained that it couldn’t be done on a national level because of the cost.
The political consultant said that when he worked on former Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell’s campaign in the 1980s, he knew how to target certain precincts to improve their voter turnout. Back then, in some precincts in the central and northern parts of Long Beach, Kell’s campaign offered free chicken dinners to anyone who would show proof that they voted. It was only done in key precincts, and Adler said that the campaign would form an agreement with certain local restaurants to pay for a set amount of dinners. They still had to offer the meal to whoever proved that they cast their ballot, and it didn’t matter how they voted.
“On a precinct level, it worked. Demonstrably so,” he said, highlighting better turnout numbers in those target precincts. “You change the 50 votes in a precinct, and you might change the outcome of a city council election.”
