Standing at 3,631 votes with several hundred ballots still to be counted, second-term City Councilperson Meghan Sahli-Wells has an outside chance to be the most popularly elected official of this century.
Former Mayor Alan Corlin owns the record, 3,750.
Feh, says Steve Rose, another ex-mayor who served on the City Council during the Corlin years.
In the good old days of the 20th century, “I believe 10 different elected officials in Culver City received at least 4,000 votes,” says the CEO/president of the Chamber of Commerce.
It was Mr. Rose who noted yesterday that the late Mayor Dan Patacchia set the Culver City record in 1964 with 4,646 votes. “That was when our population probably was 10,000 smaller than it is today,” Mr. Rose said.
Why did crowds of Culver City voters go to the polls in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s while present-day turnout is measured in dribbles?
“The simple answer,” said Mr. Rose, historian by avocation, “is an educated electorate.”
Today’s Culver City voters are more poorly informed, he said, “because of the lack of a civics education in our elementary and secondary schools. That has had a long-term impact on the electorate.
“About 60 percent of the people voted by mail in the City Council election last week,” and Mr. Rose read that as a negative.
Or was it?
The ex-Councilman was a young man in his 20s during the 1960s when that form was known as “absentee voting.
“People went to the polls with their neighbors. Or they saw their neighbors when they went to vote. I don’t know if that is true today.
“In those times, you couldn’t become a permanent absentee voter. You voted that way because, for example, you were going to be out of town on Election Day.”
Is contemporary voting by mail – a habit sweeping the country—a negative?
Mr. Rose pondered before replying.
“In today’s world,” he said, “given the busyness of people and the inability of government to open up the polls to the needs of working families, and their inability to attract knowledgeable poll workers, it probably is not a negative.”
(To be continued)
