Editorial: USAC right to offer incentives to increase voter turnout
By Editorial Board
April 2, 2015 1:26 a.m.
UCLA students don’t vote in their undergraduate elections.
Last year’s Undergraduate Students Association Council spring election summoned an abysmal 30 percent of students to vote, while the Fall special election drew less than 20 percent, invalidating important ballot referendums. For the past several years, voter turnout has hovered around 35 percent.
In an attempt to ignite student interest, USAC voted Tuesday to reserve $1,000 dollars of discretionary funds towards possibly offering voter incentives in the forms of gift cards and free drinks. If the allocation is approved at their next meeting, students who vote will be entered into a lottery which will distribute these benefits.
This board applauds the pragmatism the council has shown in considering this plan, which was put forth by Election Board Chair Shagun Kabra. It’s important that the council actively monitors the progress of this initiative and provides feedback for future, similar endeavors to increase voter turnout.
Several councilmembers expressed trepidation about the use of incentives, arguing that it wouldn’t attract authentically interested people to the polls but instead act as a bribe. But the fact is that incentives provide students with a reason to pay attention to elections, and that is valuable no matter how it’s achieved.
Additionally, measures that reward voter participation are effective. According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Politics, a Lancaster election used a lottery system to offer similar monetary remuneration to voters. As remuneration increased, so did participation.
Empirical evidence exists closer to campus, as well. As Steven Halpern chronicles in his unofficial history of Associated Students UCLA, “A View from Kerckhoff: A History of Student Life at UCLA,” a free ice cream incentive in the 1993 USAC election pushed turnout to the highest it had ever been. And that happened despite the fact that voting took place in booths rather than online, and it was a run-off election where voter attendance is usually precipitously low.
This quick history lesson should assuage those councilmembers who criticized the program as tantamount to carrot dangling and attracting people for the wrong reasons.
In a perfect world, they would be correct. However, when less than a third of a student body is voting in an election that could determine the outcome for millions of dollars in student funds, any kind of enhanced turnout is welcomed.
Kabra initially asked for $2,000 from USAC to cover this initiative, but the council determined it would not apportion more than $1,000 to the proposal until the meeting Tuesday. This may be acceptable because it minimizes costs to students, while allowing the Election Board to still experiment on a reasonable scale.
Next week, however, councilmembers should invest in increasing voter turnout and ensure they allot enough money for Kabra to sufficiently fund his program.
It is easy to be cynical and shrug off voter incentives as a viable option for increasing election turnout. But it is better to try new solutions than to resign ourselves to an uninvolved student body.
