Senior go-getters get out the vote at Reseda housing complex

Lee Weinstein, who is 87, says he’s never missed a chance to vote. It riles the former aerospace engineer when others don’t bother and then have the nerve to whine.

Harry Shragg, 90, who was a surgeon and ran a medical center, wonders if providing incentive would help. He thinks voters should be able to show their ballot stubs and maybe win prizes or discounts. Shragg has written letters along those lines to everyone he can think of — though no one, he says, has the courtesy to reply.

The topic, however, has provoked lively discussion at their Monday afternoon current events group in Reseda.

It is held in the theater of the L.A. Jewish Home’s Fountainview independent-living apartment complex, where the residents who participate don’t shy away from meaty or provocative topics: What should Turkey be doing about Islamic State? Is President Obama on the right track in the Middle East?

Live coverage continues: The election aftermath, and what it means for California

In the mix is Joy Picus, an L.A. city councilwoman for 16 years, from 1977 to 1993, who has lived with her husband, Gerald, at Fountainview since right after it opened in 2010.

Long retired from public office, Picus is anything but retiring. She still knows how to work a room and her extensive connections. She loves to get L.A.’s movers and shakers together — and to invite them for soup and a sandwich at Fountainview’s Riverview Lounge, which she considers more or less her salon.

Appalled by news of low, low turnouts in recent city and state elections, Weinstein, Picus and Shragg decided to take action. They would set an example at Fountainview by getting as many residents as possible to fill out ballots, either by mail or at the polling place a short walk away, on the Jewish Home’s campus.

The trio was aiming for 100% turnout — which even they concede probably was utopian. After all, Picus said, at least a few of the 130 people who live at Fountainview are to some extent incapacitated.

Not that she let anyone off the hook easily. When one woman who had come out of a recent hospital stay using a walker said she didn’t think she could make it to the polls, Picus and others began hunting down a wheelchair for her.

Numbers, of course, weren’t everything. Shragg, Weinstein and Picus wanted their electorate well informed. So Picus made the calls and got speakers in. In the L.A. County supervisor’s race, both Sheila Kuehl and Bobby Shriver came to state their cases at Fountainview. An expert from the League of Women Voters showed up to explain each of the ballot measures thoroughly.

Picus, a die-hard Democrat, offered advice when asked, though she tried to do so unaggressively by saying, “This is what I’m doing.” When one friend lost her election booklet, Picus offered her marked-up copy. She made last-minute house calls to various apartments to give one-on-one voter prep sessions.

On election night, she said, she stayed up until at least 2 a.m., scrolling through results on her desktop computer. She can’t exactly help herself.

She started studying political science when she entered the University of Wisconsin at 16. When she and Gerry, a physicist, moved to Southern California so he could work at Hughes Aircraft, she quickly became an activist while raising her three children in Woodland Hills. By the time she decided to run for City Council for the first time in 1973, she “knew every pothole” in the area, she said, as well as many, many voters. (She wound up in a runoff and lost by just 1% of the vote — one reason, she says, that she knows every single vote counts.)

On the council, she is particularly proud to have helped bring in the trash bins we still use today — lifted automatically by the city’s garbage trucks, which could then be manned by one person, not two. She worked to win pay equity for women in entry-level city jobs and she introduced the motion to ban discrimination at L.A.’s private clubs. She still serves on multiple boards — which is why she won’t state her age when asked. She has plenty to contribute and doesn’t brook condescension based on age.

On Wednesday, with the help of Fountainview’s staff, the high-powered get-out-the-vote threesome held an afternoon ice cream social in the complex’s dining room to announce how well their efforts had paid off.

The dining room was decorated in red, white and blue, with American flags, straw hats and shiny, star-shaped balloons. People had their pick of ice cream sandwiches, Popsicles and Fudgsicles, sugar-free and decidedly not.

L.A. County, Weinstein announced, was showing a turnout of 25% of registered voters. Statewide turnout was slightly higher, about 30%.

At Fountainview, turnout for the ice cream approached complete participation.

As for the vote, they’d managed 85%. Dorothy Feldman, 99, had voted. So had Alex Weitz, 93.

Not bad, they said, though next time they’d do better.

Follow City Beat @latimescitybeat on Twitter and at Los Angeles Times City Beat on Facebook.