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City of Mill Valley
Mill Valley Council extends terms & deliberately chooses low voter turnout for their elections
Out in Fairfax, San Anselmo, Sausalito and Novato, a number of brave residents ran for town Council in November. They participated nervously in forums, awkwardly courted endorsements, and agonized at 8:01 on election night when mail-in results were posted. From personal experience, I can tell you that running for town council is a bit scary, but also a bit repetitive.
It’s like living through the movie “Groundhog Day” as a member of a debate team. You participate in a rapid succession of public debates about the same top issues day after day. But, the public debate is the essential part about the whole process. So why were Mill Valley residents deprived of this unique experience when their November election was canceled and moved to June 2018?
The answer relates to a new law called SB 415 – The California Voter Participation Act. This law was passed by the State of California to consolidate elections to even years to boost voter turnout. The rationale was simple: piggyback the local elections onto the “big” federal elections and you get more voters participating.
Localities in Marin have chosen to make the switch to even years in various ways. In order to accomplish this, some chose to break their covenant with voters and extend their own terms and some didn’t. Some chose to schedule their elections in November on even year to maximize voter turnout to align with federal elections. Still others chose to hold their elections in June on even years to align with the traditional period for local elections and lesser federal elections such as presidential primaries, when voter turnout is considerably lower.
Obviously, if one wanted to increase voter participation, the first choice was the best: hold all elections in November of even numbered years. Mill Valley council members, however, chose to extend their own terms and to hold elections in June in order to deliberately get lower turnout.
Councilmember John McCauley explained his preference for June:
“In an election year, as we all learned from proposition H, it’s very expensive, ironically, because of the high expected voter turnout which makes it more difficult for somebody to run. You have a lot of people who are not going to be too focused. They’re going to get who’s got the best mailer and that’s going to have an impact on who is going to be selected because you have a different type of person voting on that day.”
McCauley concluded that
“Everyone is not going to be able to [afford to run for City Council in November of an election year] and you wouldn’t want to eliminate or make it more difficult for people who would basically have to spend their whole-time fundraising.”
Let’s get this straight. He is claiming that the government’s primary obligation here is to set election dates to make is easier for candidates instead of for voters? He is claiming that a larger voter turnout would scare away new candidates because running for election might cost more? Where is the evidence of that?
Also, what exactly does McCauley mean by “you have a different type of person voting on that day”? Is he suggesting that Mill Valley residents who vote during a big election in November are too addle-brained to make competent well-reasoned decisions about who to vote for because there are more issues and candidates for different offices on the ballot? Is he suggesting that Mill Valley voters are too busy in November that they don’t have the mental bandwidth to “focus?” Again, where is the evidence of that?
Councilmember Jim Wickman suggested “This is crazy, but maybe put it on Survey Monkey on our website just to get comments from the public because I don’t want this to look self-serving.”
Getting as many voters as possible to participate in an election is simply the right thing to do. So, what would possibly be the motivation to move in a counter-democratic direction? It seems to me that if you intentionally schedule elections at times when you know that voter turnout will be less, you are ensuring that those elections will heavily favor the incumbents who have worked to cultivate a loyal group of followers and can typically win local Marin elections by slim margins.
After the final vote to extend terms and hold elections in June, Jessica Sloan stated: “So don’t be surprised if there’s a bunch of pitchforks at the next meeting.” Remember that those big-election November types, to which John McCauley refers, still have a chance to step out of their normal routine and bring their pitchforks to the poles in June and vote for true public service and not just the appearance of it.