GOP Sees Foes’ Lures to Voters as Dirty Dozens

They can make you fat and rot your teeth. And now doughnuts are, of all things, under fire as the latest threat to democracy as we know it.

California Republican Chairman Robert W. Naylor complained Wednesday that Democrats came right up to the edge of the law and may have touched off a chain reaction that will change electoral politics across the state when they handed out 13,000 dozen doughnuts in a recent Southern California legislative race.

The “doughnut caper,” Naylor fumed, “amounts to vote buying.”

The doughnuts--$40,000 worth or roughly 35 million calories--were given away to 33rd State Senate District residents in the May 12 special election won by Democrat Cecil N. Green. He upset once-favored GOP candidate Wayne Grisham in the Norwalk-Hawaiian Gardens-Santa Fe Springs district and dampened Republican hopes of eventually winning control of the state Legislature.

The gimmick worked like this: Everybody who voted was eligible on election day to go to one of seven doughnut shops and redeem their voter stub for a dozen doughnuts. The trick was that only voters identified in advance as pro-Green were told of the offer via letters and door-hangers on election day.

Some Ran Out

So popular was the idea that some shops ran out of doughnuts by mid-morning and had to hand out rain checks.

Naylor said Republicans will try to have the practice outlawed. Failing that, he said, the GOP will have no choice but to ante up with prizes of its own on election day.

“It should be illegal,” he said “. . . You can find your committed voter and induce them to vote by paying them something, some kind of a prize. You’re limited only by your imagination by what this could be. We’re going to be in a bidding war to see who can induce the most voters with a prize, whether it be doughnuts, or croissants, or Carl’s Jr.’s hamburgers or a bottle of wine when you register and another when you vote.”

So what is wrong with that, Naylor was asked in a breakfast interview with reporters

Such enticements, he replied, will make politics both more costly and cheaper.

“You’re talking about . . . an atmosphere in which voting is not a civic duty--it’s something you do because someone is offering you a gimmick. That’s a real cheapening of the process,” he said.

Response by Democrats

Democrats scoffed at the GOP’s complaints and said Green’s victory was chiefly due to the merits of his campaign and hard work by party volunteers.

“Gimmicks don’t win elections,” said Robert Forsythe, spokesman for state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles). “This is just a replacement for the campaign button that nobody wears anymore. But it does signal a re-emphasis on ground operations in politics.”

Secretary of State March Fong Eu’s office approved the doughnut operation in advance, saying it did not violate California’s vote-buying prohibition. “There is nothing in the election code that precludes this. What you cannot do is say, I’m Cecil Green, vote for me and you get a dozen doughnuts. You can say, I’m Cecil Green, vote and you get a dozen doughnuts,” said spokeswoman Melissa Warren.

Election officials note that federal law is much stricter on the subject and would not allow get-out-the-vote enticements. In 1982, a man proposed a California lottery of voter stubs, offering prizes as an enticement to vote, but the U.S. Justice Department said this would be illegal, according to California officials.

Political observers said the doughnut idea was not entirely original. Reportedly, a variation was used in 1972 in a state Assembly election in the Westside of Los Angeles, and free-chicken dinners were offered to voters in one Long Beach City Council race a few years back, causing a traffic jam in one area.

Larry L. Sheingold, who managed Green’s election campaign, said free pizzas were first considered. “But they take too long to make them.” And then, he added, there was the novel idea attributed to labor organizers in Italy. “They gave people one shoe and said they would get the other when they voted. We didn’t think that was practical.”