Voter turnout expected to be only 25 percent for L.A. elections

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Not many voters are expected to show up at polling places today.

Los Angeles' voting apathy for local elections is not common in other large cities. For instance, a median of 48 percent of registered voters in Chicago and 41 percent of those in San Francisco, according to a 2007 study cited by the Los Angeles Times. About 16 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the mayoral election four years ago.

"L.A. isn't Chicago. L.A. isn't New York. L.A. isn't Boston," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the USC Price School of Public Policy. "We don't eat, drink and breathe electoral politics, so we don't have that socialization to begin with."

The culture of low-voter turnout is one thing, but mayoral candidates for Tuesday's election also did not inspire casual voters to rush to the polls.

"If you're not motivated by a candidate, by an issue, by a need to articulate a point of view -- And if you look at where we are today, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people motivated -- You're not going to go out to vote," Jeffe said.

According to the Los Angeles City Clerk's Office, 148,846 mail-in ballots have been submitted, which represents 22.4 percent of the ballots sent out to voters.

Low turnout does not divide equally across all social groups. Dr. Fernando Guerra, the Director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, notes that 48 percent the population living in L.A. is Latino, but Latinos are only expected to make up about 22 percent of the voters in Tuesday's election. So what are some common traits of non-voters in the city?

"That population tends to be much more dependent on mass transit, tends to be much more in need of affordable housing, tends to have much less medical care, tends to live on the margins to a much greater degree," said Guerra.

They also tend to skew older and are more likely to be homeowners, making those groups of people the demographics that candidates try to attract.

"Once you own a home, you become very invested in that home, in that neighborhood in the city," Guerra said. "You care about how issues are going to impact your property values, and therefore homeowners are the number one group that get courted."

The Center for the Study of Los Angeles projects that only 600,000 people, about one in every six Los Angeles residents, will vote in Tuesday's election. No matter who wins, Guerra says that is a small sliver of the city choosing government officials for everyone. Angelenos will choose their new mayor from the two leading vote-getters on May 21.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons