A Latino democratic participation organisation has come up with a controversial tactic to combat voter apathy: a $25,000 cash prize.
The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) is offering the bounty to arouse interest in the 19 May election for the Los Angeles board of education’s district 5 seat, a contest which has attracted turnouts as low as 11%.
It is calling the prize a “voteria”, rhyming with loteria, Spanish for lottery. “Whoever votes legally in the election will automatically be entered,” Mario Solis-Marich, a spokesman, told the Guardian.
It is an innovative pilot project to boost turnout for an election which is important – the board’s decisions affect hundreds of thousands of school children – but has often sent voters to sleep. “The idea is to find out if something like this will persuade people to go out and vote,” he said.
Critics are appalled. “The winner gets $25,000. The losers are those who still believe in the integrity of the democratic process,” the Los Angeles Times protested in an editorial on Tuesday.
It said the gimmick perverted the motivation to vote and demeaned its value. “And it’s the most superficial pseudo-solution to a very real problem in Los Angeles, which is the pervasive civic malaise that prevents so many eligible voters from feeling truly engaged. In fact, the voteria only underscores the cynical view that people don’t care about their local government anymore and the only way to get them to vote is to bribe them.”
Solis-Marich disputed that: “It’s not bribery. It’s an incentive.” The SVREP, the largest and oldest nonpartisan Latino voter participation organisation in the United States, was not backing any particular candidate in the election, he added.
Los Angeles and much of California is battling with low voter turnout. Just 23.3% voted in LA’s 2013 mayoral election, the lowest figure in a century. Analysts have blamed the city’s size, sprawl and mobile population.
Traditionally, voters get only an “I voted” sticker at polling stations. Citing desperate measures for desperate times, the Los Angeles Ethics Commission mulled a lottery proposal last year but the idea faltered. Arizona considered a $1m jackpot incentive in 2006 but voters rejected it.
In 1999, the Democratic Party in the San Francisco bay area tried offering free chicken and potato salad dinners to residents in low turnout precincts in exchange for voting in an assembly primary. The Alameda County registrar blasted the offer as repugnant violation of the spirit of the law which reduced the electoral system to “third world standards”.
