The Culver City Senior Center should make voting for its Board of Directors more transparent, and it should institute reforms that are commonly accepted in other organizations.
Transparency would allow for honest elections.
These are among the changes that I would like to see the Senior Center make.
According to its by-laws and constitution, voting in the elections every November is supposed to be conducted for “one week.”
For whatever reason, though, the voting is done Monday through Friday, a 5-day period, not a full week, even though we presently have Senior Center members who are living in more than 90 zip codes in our great state.
After each day’s balloting, done from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the ballots are taken into a back room at the Senior Center, whereupon people count the ballots. The ballots are held in that room until the end of the voting period.
The Way Elections Are Conducted
Generally speaking, in every election we have, the ballots are counted when the polls close.
We also don’t know who goes out and gets the people to volunteer to hand out the ballots and to count the votes.
Further, when the ballots finally are counted, the results are not made public. Therefore, we don’t know how many people voted for each candidate.
The numbers are not given out, we were told in Board meetings, because some senior citizens are so fragile that if they knew not only that they did not win but that they received relatively few votes, this news might do harm to them.
When any American citizen registered to vote wants to cast his ballot, at a local precinct, the person identifies himself. He signs his name on a roster so that at the end of the day, the number of signatures can be tabulated against the number of ballots that have been cast.
This is not done at the Culver City Senior Center.
The Hometown Method
What they do is to take your membership card, punch a hole in it, and then they give you a ballot. You vote, and put it in the ballot box.
As I said earlier, the ballots are taken into a back room at the end of each day, and anonymous people count ‘em.
The big problem with that is — I am not suggesting they lack integrity — as anyone can see, if a friend of a person counting is behind after the first or second or third day, the counter can say, “You are falling behind. You better get out your vote if you want to win.”
Consider this: I went to Office Depot, I made 10 copies of my membership card, and I gave a report at the Senior Center.
Bill LaPointe, the Parks, Recreation and Community Services director, was there to hear it at the August meeting
I showed that it would be possible for a person to vote at 9 a.m. by showing one membership card on Monday, to get a second membership card and return to vote again in the afternoon when somebody else is liable to be there, overseeing the election.
Isn’t It Obvious?
Anybody, including Stevie Wonder, Jose Feliciano or Ray Charles if he were still alive, could easily see that there is a potential problem here.
I am not saying it is actually taking place.
But I am saying it is a potential problem, especially when there are no recounts. That is correct.
I personally asked for a recount last year, and you would have thought I was asking for something very serious.
I have been a member of the Culver City Senior Center for about 5 years. I have brought up these “impossible improvements” before, to the Board and to individual members.
Last August, I brought this up to the Board at a meeting as an agendized item.
The Board was not receptive.
I found out, much to my happiness, that one day recently, a sub-committee was formed to review the by-laws for possible changes.
I am hopeful we can institute changes to make the coming elections more transparent.
There is no doubt in my mind that my prompting has led to this.
I was told that City Hall has been talking to the Executive Board of the Senior Center, four people out of 6,000 members. The four officers are Murray Silman, Barbara Silverstein, Lionel Crown and Sharon Elstein. I was told one person was not there, but I don’t know which one.
If you look at our constitution and by-laws, you will see that there is no Executive Board.
If people want to talk, it should be to the elected members of the Board of Directors.
I am suggesting that for fairness, for open elections, what we should do is have a better system of allowing those people who want to vote to do so for 7 days, not 5.
This is because we have people who live in over 90 zip codes. Some of them may be people who are working Monday through Friday. Maybe they only come to the Senior Center on Saturday or Sunday. Those people are being disenfranchised.
We had a sub-committee last year, chaired by the Secretary, Lionel Crown, who wanted to increase participation. I am in favor of that.
But we have to do it in a certain manner.
Here is my suggestion: We go in, get a ballot and sign our name. The ballot is kept in a ballot box, unopened, until the polls close.
Then the ballots are brought out and counted in front of everybody who wants to be there.
This way we would know the number of votes each candidate receives.
At the last election in November, there was a note on the ballot “Vote for only 6.” I believe there were 9 positions people were being elected to.
If I were going to hazard a guess as to why we were told “Vote for only 6,” it is a lot easier to count a ballot with 6 check marks than it is to count a ballot with 9 check marks.
I don’t know what is going on.
But in my opinion, and I emphasize it is my opinion, what we need are open elections.
I brought this up to a senior member of our city staff. When I told him what was going on, he was totally dumbfounded.
There has not been one person I have told these facts to who could honestly believe this was the way to handle an election.
