Going into this evening’s 7 o’clock City Council meeting that marks a triumphant return to renovated Council Chambers, this may be an opportune hour to erase the board and write in a major policy change.
A discussion of all-mail voting is the centerpiece of the back-home agenda for two reasons:
- Ostensibly, Culver City voters approved the increasingly popular concept nine years ago as one barely-noticed plank in the heavily voter-approved overhaul of the City Charter, and
- Traditional voter turnout in Culver City has nearly slipped out of view.
With at least two Council members – Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells, leading her final meeting, and Jim Clarke – fervently favoring all-mail voting, something positive seems likely to happen. What form action will take is not clear.
The next hometown election will be in November, a School Board race. Council members will be up for election next April.
Councilman Andy Weissman, who chaired the 2006 Charter Review Committee, recalled over the weekend that all-mail voting was well down the ballot, hardly a topic of riveting conversation.
“At no time in any of the campaign forums that I attended that year did the issue of all-vote-by-mail ever come up,” Mr. Weissman said. “All that people were talking about was changing to a city manager-form of government from a chief administrative officer.”
Mr. Weissman did not sound as if he will be an affirmative vote this evening.
“I am not suggesting we do away with the notion of ‘absentee ballots,’” the original name for voting-by-mail, he said.
But…
“I am not sure I want to abandon the polling place in favor of ‘the only way you can vote is to fill this out at home and mail it in.’”
Mr. Weissman noted that “you still have people who don’t trust the mails. They are afraid of putting their ballot in the mailbox because they are not sure it is going to make it or that it will be counted.”
Such doubts “may represent old thinking,” Mr. Weissman conceded.
“However, I think voting is something special. Doing it like the way you would pay your utility bill takes away from that special feeling.”
