Fed Up With Politics, Many Just Won’t Vote

Wendy Pacheco has the red-white-and-blue flu, and she’s got it bad. There’s the inability to concentrate as the slick brochures start their steady slide into the mailbox. The feeling that her vote doesn’t even count.

At least she doesn’t have the nausea that grips John Arbogash whenever he thinks about politicians. Or the guilt that racks Al Leach, a guy who has had this peculiarly American ailment for the past 63 years and passed it on to his daughter, Gillian, 25.

It’s a week before election day in the bellwether Inland Empire--where politicians, pundits and political writers go to take the temperature of the California electorate--and Pacheco, Arbogash, Leach Father and Leach Daughter won’t be voting. They are sick to death of politics.

In an election year when voter turnout is being scrutinized more closely than ever to see if events in Washington will trickle to places like this, it is difficult to find citizens excited about the act of voting or the candidates available.

That is true even in Ontario, where more political hopefuls than ever are vying for City Council seats: 21 candidates in four races. Sure, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin describes this campaign as “the most crowded in the history of Ontario politics.” But in dozens of interviews in this fast-growing blue-collar bastion, residents were evenly split between those who said they couldn’t be bothered to cast a ballot and those who will probably vote--if only grudgingly--on Tuesday.

“It doesn’t matter,” says a blase Pacheco, 18. “Like one vote wouldn’t really make a difference.”

Formerly a safe Democratic stronghold, now a volatile swing region populated with young families wooed by affordable housing and thousands of new manufacturing and distribution jobs, Ontario bristles with yard signs touting everyone from “Working Joe Baca for State Senate” to “Gary Ovitt for Mayor.”

Gary Ovitt, who was Wendy Pacheco’s high school government teacher. Whom Pacheco describes as “really great with people, a good man,” as she spreads out the local newspaper on the counter at the gleaming new Ontario airport where she works. Whose picture she points to with pride on Page A6. Whose candidacy can’t even get his own onetime student to the polls.

“I would vote if I was really into that,” Pacheco says from behind the counter of the News Connection. “I just go to school and work.”

Slow Slide From Involvement

From the strip malls to the Civic Center, from Molly’s Cafe to the LeRoy Boys’ Home Thrift Shop where coffee mugs go five for a dollar, voters and nonvoters alike expressed disgust this week over the current state of the political process, a system that may soon turn them away from the exercise of their civic right, if it hasn’t already.

Sipping coffee at Molly’s counter in the waning days of the 1998 election season, Arbogash recounted with little pride his slow slide from the practice of democracy. He used to be a Republican; now he’s not registered at all. He voted as recently as 1994; now he refuses.

“People ask me now, ‘Why don’t you vote?’ ” says this auto mechanic who wants to be a deputy sheriff. “They make me feel like a dirt bag. . . . I’m disgusted with the whole setup, with all the lies. Everything’s programmed. [Politicians] say what you want to hear to your face and lie to you behind your back.”

Arbogash used to make the effort to read the fine print and try to figure out what was really being offered in the welter of California ballot propositions, in the he-said-she-said of the modern campaign. But it seems to be getting harder these days, to take more time, requires a bigger leap of faith.

A leap that he can no longer make when he listens to politicians--the president in particular. “Everything they told you changed when they got into office--all promises and nothing kept,” Arbogash rues. And the initiatives? “You think you voted for something, but you really voted against it. It’s trickery. It’s disgusting.”

Voters don’t like to feel like fools, and sometimes that’s what democracy reduces them to. Jerry McClanahan, a retired General Motors parts salesman, says he will probably vote in favor of Proposition 5 on Indian casinos and against Proposition 10, the cigarette tax initiative.

“I like to gamble, I like smoking, and the way they treat the Indians is terrible,” he says from his perch in the local Cheaper Cigarettes store. But he has pretty much stopped voting for people. And the whole effort is increasingly dicey, because “it seems like every time I go to vote, it’s already decided.”

McClanahan’s favorite tale of democracy concerns his father-in-law, who lives in Bullhead City, Ariz. Picture this: It’s 1996, and the old man is standing in line outside his desert precinct, when some guy turns on a portable radio. It’s late, and what does the broadcaster do? He calls the election.

McClanahan says his father-in-law “heard it was already over. His vote wouldn’t mean anything. He got out of line and went home. I think a lot of people feel that way.”

Not everyone is so introspective. Why won’t Angie Torres vote? “Some of us don’t care.” And Susan Smith? “I don’t know why I don’t. I voted one year, and I think that’s why. Who I voted for didn’t win.”

It’s people like this who are K. “Monty” Jordan’s “major league pet peeve.” This Vietnam veteran, this proud Republican with his inscribed photo of Ronald Reagan on the office wall doesn’t blame people for turning off, but says, “I don’t think we should be victimized.

“People get to the point where they feel they have no control, and don’t care,” says Jordan, who always votes and remembers where he cast his first ballot--Ft. Bragg, N.C.--and for whom: Richard Nixon in 1972. “But where do we go from there? Take control!”

Oddly enough, Al Leach would have to agree. The former commercial artist kind of kicks himself for never having cast a ballot, especially when he hears his daughter talk about a life of nonvoting, talk about considering it this time so she could vote in favor of Indian gaming but deciding, “Nah.”

“You got people saying it’s helping the Indians with housing and stuff like that,” Gillian muses about Proposition 5 as she shops with her father and her 3-year-old daughter. “But everybody’s battling. You never know what to believe in. It’s kind of scary.”

Al the nonvoter shakes his head and delivers an afternoon civics lesson: “Voting is one of the tools that we need to keep America the way it should be--free,” he says. “I see that it’s my fault you haven’t been educated in what politics really is.”

Al Leach the Elder may be on to something when he talks about voting as learned behavior. Here in the middle of the LeRoy thrift shop is a three-generation nonvoting family, where only the toddler has a good excuse.

Across town at the Ontario Mills shopping center--ice cream-colored building blocks against a taupe sky--James Lindsay, a probation officer who says he always, always votes, talks fondly about his parents and their determined citizenship.

“I remember when I was in fourth grade my parents rushing home and making it a big issue to go vote,” Lindsay says. “I remember them saying, ‘We’ve got to get the right people in office’ and rushing off to vote. It goes way back for me.”

But even this determined Democrat is having a little trouble this year jump-starting the research necessary for voting. It’s like this time, he just can’t get interested. Who does he like for governor? It’s a flip of the coin.

“I’m kind of just floating this time,” he says, a little troubled. “Maybe because of the Clinton scandal, I’m not into it.”

That voter’s pamphlet? It’s still sitting at home unopened. “Can you believe that?” He shakes his head. Laughs. Yeah, he’ll get to it. “Probably this weekend.”