Volunteer Group Seeks to Emphasize the Issues : Elections: Citizens Jury is trying to increase voter registration and turnout in 36th Congressional District.

It’s a bit large as test tubes go, but the South Bay’s 36th Congressional District has become the site of a political science experiment.

Former U.S. Senate candidate Ted Bruinsma, a visiting scholar at Claremont Graduate School, is organizing a grass-roots drive to boost voter registration and turnout in the 36th, which runs from San Pedro to Venice.

Called Citizens Jury, the bipartisan volunteer group is consulting residents on the issues and planning cable TV spots and at least one public forum featuring the candidates for the district’s open seat.

The objective, says Bruinsma, who lost a bid for the Republican nomination for the Senate in 1982, is to get residents involved in defining the campaign issues--and to compel the candidates to fully address those questions.

That could be tough, considering that the 36th includes all or part of a dozen cities and has drawn more than 21 candidates. But if it works, Bruinsma says, the effort could be a model for combatting voter apathy.

“Voters are participating in smaller numbers than ever before,” said the Rancho Palos Verdes resident, 71. “If we can take an area and reverse that trend, this can be tried in other places.”

Bruinsma, a retired investor and former dean of Loyola Law School, said the project stems from his studies at Claremont Graduate School’s Center for Politics and Policy.

Thomas Rochon, an associate professor at the school, said faculty members and Bruinsma have talked for more than a year about what they view as a chronic inability of the federal government to make difficult and creative decisions.

Their conclusion, Rochon said, is that proposals such as legislative term limits only address symptoms of governmental gridlock. The real problem, the group agreed, lies closer to home.

“We’ve come to the realization that the responsibility lies mainly with the individual citizen,” Rochon said. “Getting people more aware of the issues and involved in the issues--that holds politicians and institutions more closely accountable.”

Bruinsma is the first group member to try to test that theory.

“The electorate has become a spectator sitting back and looking at these contests like a football game,” Bruinsma said. “There’s a disconnect between the electorate and the process. This is an experiment to see if we can change that.”

Conducting that experiment has not been easy. Already, Citizens Jury has debated whether it should raise large amounts of money for mailers and polls or stick to one of the project’s main goals--to create a grass-roots organization that could be duplicated easily in other communities.

Members opted to keep it simple. Said Bruinsma: “Maybe you’d get a better result but you’re not getting the people’s result.”

And it is unclear how receptive candidates will be to Citizens Jury’s calls for an informative, smear-free campaign. Bruinsma said one of the candidates--he declined to say which--reacted negatively after being told that the group will ask congressional contestants to sign a pledge aimed at preventing negative campaigning.

“They told me, ‘We have a conflict because we want to do it right but our consultants tell us that negative wins,’ ” Bruinsma said.

So far, Citizens Jury has spent most of its time distributing questionnaires to hundreds of district residents to identify the key concerns of voters. The group hopes to pass out 1,800 of the forms, which ask residents to rank issues ranging from defense to health care and to comment on each of them in detail.

Doing the legwork is a bipartisan group of 65 volunteers ranging from Michael Kilroy, a 28-year-old real estate developer from Palos Verdes Estates, to Henry Degener Sr., 69, who works part time at the front desk of the San Pedro YMCA, checking identification.

Volunteers say the public’s response to the questionnaires has been good. Kilroy, for instance, says the forms have drawn strong interest from surfers who are friends of his brother, and Degener reports that they have been snapped up by retirees who work out at the YMCA.

Asked why they are taking part in the project, volunteers say they hope to force candidates to speak plainly to the public.

“Otherwise, the politicians would continue on their merry way, dissembling, temporizing and engaging in thoughtless moralizing,” said Thomas Rush, 64, of Lomita, a retired aerospace engineer.

Citizens Jury is trying to interest local cable TV channels in airing public service programs, free of charge, in which issues raised in the Citizens Jury questionnaires are put to the candidates. Bruinsma said he will pay for print advertising for the programs out of his own pocket.

The group, which does not plan to endorse a candidate, is also organizing a candidates forum for late May--as close as possible to the June 2 primaries--and may also hold a forum earlier in the month.

Bruinsma said he will measure the effects of Citizens Jury by analyzing voter registration and turnout trends in the communities that form the 36th District. If the results from this year’s congressional race look significantly stronger than those from past contests, he said, he will consider the effort worth repeating.

“It’s like a test that a business will do with a new product,” Bruinsma said. “You go out and try it somewhere, and if it works, you expand it.”

The Top 10 Issues in the 36th District Citizens Jury has distributed questionnaires to hundreds of residents of the 36th Congressional District to identify the key concerns of voters. With 414 responses evaluated so far, here are the rankings.

1. Economy

2. Environment

3. Crime

4. Education

5. (tie) National Defense

Taxation

7. (tie) Health

Campaigns

9. Foreign Aid

10. Competition