Santa Ana’s Voter Sign-Up Rate Worst in County

Santa Ana has the worst voter registration rate of any city in Orange County, according to figures from the state Department of Finance and the county registrar of voters.

Just 30% of Santa Ana’s 226,000 residents were registered to vote as of last November--a full 10 percentage points behind Stanton, the city with the second-lowest rate, and 36 percentage points behind the one with the highest, Seal Beach.

The city clerk’s office gathered the statistics as part of a proposal to boost registration figures that will be considered by the City Council next Monday.

“I knew the situation was bad, but I didn’t think we were that far behind,” said City Councilman Miguel Pulido Jr. “I think we’re on to something hot.”

Pulido, one of two Latinos on the seven-member City Council, is proposing that city employees, in the course of daily business, try to register residents to vote.

“I’m not suggesting that we go out there and knock on doors to register people . . . but just ask folks when they come in if they’re registered to vote, or if they’d like to be,” he said.

The city’s large Latino and Asian immigrant populations keep Santa Ana’s voter registration percentage down, Pulido said, even though many illegal immigrants are not included in official population estimates, and would drive the percentage down further if they were. Of the city’s counted population, about 45% are Latinos and 7% are of Asian origin. Pulido estimated that there are another 50,000 to 60,000 undocumented immigrant residents.

But there are also many citizens of Latino or Asian descent who are eligible to vote but have not registered “because no one has approached them and made it easy,” Pulido said.

Richard Martinez, field director for the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, praised Pulido’s idea. The association helps in registration drives in several communities with large Latino populations in the Southwestern states.

“It sounds like a good idea . . . as long as they don’t register people on a partisan basis,” Martinez said.

Key factors in Santa Ana’s low voter registration are at-large elections for the school board and the City Council, and the fact that there are few minority candidates, Martinez said.

“There has to be a reason why they (Latinos) should register, and if there are no candidates representing their issues, it’s going to be difficult,” he said.

An initiative that would have made Santa Ana’s City Council members elected only by the voters in their wards was narrowly defeated in November, 1986.

The Southwest Voters Project was highly critical of Santa Ana’s citywide elections after that defeat and said it would study the situation. But the group never filed a lawsuit challenging it, as it has done in several other California cities.

Under the present system, council members are elected citywide but represent one of seven wards. In November, the number of wards will drop to six and a mayor will be elected citywide as the seventh member.