July 17--Ivan Rojas didn't recognize the phone number when he got the call that morning. So he went back to sleep. Later, when he listened to the message, he decided it must be a crank call or a scam.
"Nowadays, you can't trust anybody," he said.
How else to explain someone telling him that he'd won the grand prize, $25,000, for a contest he did not knowingly enter?
And all because he voted.
An experiment in local elections ended Friday with Rojas, a 35-year-old security guard, receiving a check as the winner of a lottery that included everyone who voted in District 5 for the Los Angeles Board of Education. The May runoff election pitted incumbent Bennett Kayser against Ref Rodriguez; Rodriguez won.
"I was shocked," said Rojas. "I still can't believe it."
The voter lottery was the brainchild of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and its president, Antonio Gonzalez. A main focus of the nonprofit is increasing voter turnout, especially within the Latino community. The group also has recruited and trained Latinos to run for office, although it cannot endorse specific candidates.
Gonzalez considers Voteria a success, although he had concerns that many people would not hear of it.
Voters who cast ballots in the hopes of winning the lottery, which was called Voteria, were more likely to vote for Rodriguez by a 2-to-1 ratio, according to researchers at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
"Did Voteria potentially provide the margin of victory? It was very close," said Fernando Guerra, the center director, who oversaw a survey of voters in that district. Without the boost from the lottery, "it means Rodriguez would have won barely and it would have meant the possibility of a recount. It would have positioned Rodriguez going on the school board as a bare winner rather than a clear winner."
In the final tally, Rodriguez received 53% of the vote compared with 47% for Kayser.
The idea behind the lottery was to boost Latino turnout in a portion of the school system that has regularly elected Anglos even though a large majority of its voters are Latino.
The name Voteria was a spinoff of the Spanish word, Loteria, for lottery.
Rojas did not learn of the lottery until Election Day, when a poll worker mentioned it; he'd planned to vote anyway and quickly forgot about the lottery after leaving his polling place.
The survey found that 16.4% of voters said they knew about it. About a quarter of those said the lottery made them more likely to vote. The influence was greater among Latinos and among low-income and underemployed voters, according to the survey.
Gonzalez said he relied on social media and traditional media, such as newspaper and television coverage, to spread the word. He also apparently had some help from one or both campaigns on behalf of the two candidates.
All respondents who said they'd heard of the lottery mentioned that it was brought up by campaign workers who visited their home. About 1 in 3 said they'd also heard of Voteria from a flier or mailer.
Neither Gonzalez's group nor the official Rodriguez campaign sent out fliers about the lottery, they said. But there also were independent campaigns at work, on behalf of Rodriguez and Kayser.
One postcard provided to The Times was sent to the address of a voter with a Latino surname. It talks about Voteria in English and Spanish and includes an excerpt from a Times article -- also in English and Spanish -- about the lottery. The card does not advocate for a particular candidate and does not disclose the sender.
Kayser said he regarded the lottery as a thinly veiled attempt to help Rodriguez, one that accomplished its objective, although he stopped short of blaming his loss on it.
The survey also found that, barring other factors, voters favored a candidate backed by unions, which Kayser was, over one supported by charter schools, which describes Rodriguez.
Charters are publicly funded and independently operated, and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. Most are non-union, including a group of schools co-founded by Rodriguez.
In this campaign at least, the cash prize wasn't enough, by itself, to overcome the affinity that most voters had with union-backed candidates, according to the survey.
Whatever its role in the outcome, Guerra thinks the lottery increased voter turnout, even though only 10% cast ballots. The effort could have had a bigger influence had more people known about it.
"My No. 1 conclusion is that the Voteria experiment has tremendous potential, the potential to really increase turnout," Guerra said.
Rojas agreed.
"Historically, Latinos have not really gone to the polling places, especially in the smaller elections," said Rojas, who plans to buy himself a $100 steak dinner but to put most of the money into savings.
If the lottery backers "are able to advertise and get the word out, I'm sure more people would vote."
He added: "I vote anyway. It's just icing on the cake for me."
For the survey, trained student volunteers from LMU polled 312 voters as they left 15 randomly selected polling places. An additional 250 voters took part before the election. To participate, these voters had to have mailed in ballots or filled out vote-by-mail ballots. The projected margin of error is 4%, higher for questions that were answered only by a portion of the survey group.
The study was funded by the university.
