Memory Lane for League of Women Voters

You never know what’s going to happen during an election debate. Just ask members of the League of Women Voters in Ventura County, who have been organizing candidate forums for the past 35 years.

They’ll tell you about the city council candidate who didn’t know anything about his city. Or the candidate for Congress who threatened to sue the nonprofit group unless it scheduled a forum to fit her calendar.

But the most outrageous incident, league organizers say, was the time a process server interrupted a debate in Ojai to serve legal papers on a candidate.

“It caused a real brouhaha,” recalled longtime league member Jean Harris. “The moderator from the League of Women Voters told the process server it was an inappropriate thing and got rid of him.”

Such aplomb in the face of controversy has served the league well in the 35 years since the county chapter was established in 1959, observers say.

The nonpartisan group, with 260 members countywide, is known for its ability to sponsor forums with no taint of favoritism, said Bruce Bradley, the county’s election division chief.

“If they weren’t here, who else would do it?” Bradley said.

Besides sponsoring candidate forums, the league’s mission is to educate people about the democratic process and to issue position papers on topics of interest, said Dorothy Engel, president of the local chapter.

“There are so many people opting out of elections nowadays,” she said. “They distrust government. Yet they are the government.”

Since 1959, the local chapter has organized dozens of election debates, Engel said. On Thursday, it sponsored a forum involving 16 candidates running for the City Council in Thousand Oaks.

But the forums that stand out in Harris’ mind occurred in past election seasons, she said.

About 10 years ago, a woman whom Harris declined to identify was running for Congress. She told the league she would file a lawsuit against it unless it scheduled a forum for a day when she was free. But every time a league organizer came up with a new time, the candidate turned it down, saying she wasn’t available, Harris recalled.

And nearly every electoral cycle brings a candidate “who knows absolutely nothing” about the area he or she is seeking to represent, Harris said.