Westwood Neighborhood Council brings back vote-by-mail option
(Daily Bruin file photo)
By Catherine Liberty Feliciano
Oct. 15, 2015 9:24 a.m.
The Westwood Neighborhood Council voted Wednesday to spend $3,500 to offer vote by mail for its election cycle next year after city officials eliminated the option earlier this month.
Councilmembers were discontented when the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, a city organization that manages Los Angeles neighborhood councils, said last month they would no longer offer a vote-by-mail option for next year’s neighborhood council elections.
The city clerk told the council it would have to pay $3,500 to keep the vote-by-mail option, after councilmembers asked for a subsidy to reinstate the option.
Stephen Box, director of outreach and communications for DONE, said last month the option was not cost-effective because of the declining number of voters who use it. He added DONE officials estimated voter turnout would triple if they switched to online voting.
The council voted against offering an online voting option for Westwood residents during its September meeting. If the council had not agreed to pay for the vote-by-mail option, residents could only vote by physically going to the polls.
WWNC President Jerry Brown said he thinks replacing the vote by mail option with online voting would negatively impact voters without access to a computer or a polling station. He added he thinks online voting is still a work in progress that could work in the future, but still needs to be tested outside of the neighborhood council system.
Jacob Finn, the only councilmember who voted against the proposition, said he opposed the allocation because he thinks the council should focus on improving student voter turnout since Westwood is a college town.
Finn said that he thinks $3,500 is a substantial portion of the council’s almost $40,000 budget that could be better spent, and he hopes the council will discuss online voting again.
Undergraduate Students Association Council Facilities Commissioner Ian Cocroft, who was appointed to the board’s student position earlier in the meeting, said he thinks the vote-by-mail option makes it easy for students who can’t access polling stations.
“I think online voting with the proper safeguards is important to improving student participation,” he said.
Brown said he asked the city clerk to subsidize the cost of the council to reinstate vote by mail in consideration of about $500,000 the city will spend to implement online voting.
The city and the council compromised at $3,500, a sum Brown said would be covered by an additional $5,000 allocation Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wessen promised to each neighborhood council.
Laura Winikow, the council’s treasurer, amended the motion, proposing the council temporarily remove the sum from the council’s Community Improvement Project budget in the event Wessen does not follow through with his funding promise.
The Community Improvement Project budget is a general fund intended to improve the neighborhood. In the past, the council has used the funds for community beautification and disaster awareness events, Winikow said.
Out of 97 L.A.neighborhoods, eight including Westwood expressed interest in using the vote-by-mail option for 2016 council elections.
Box said more than a third of Westwood’s about 660 votes cast in Westwood’s 2014 elections were received by mail, the largest number among L.A. neighborhoods.
