Register and Then Vote

A good newspaper, playwright Arthur Miller once said, is a nation talking to itself. The same could be said about a good election.

Ask a candidate what voters are talking about, as editors of Valley Perspective have over the past weeks, and you’ll hear a litany of key issues. Education. Transportation. Growth. The environment. Health care.

Voters care passionately, the candidates tell us, about children falling through the cracks because of overcrowded schools. Voters care that they’re spending far too much of their lives sitting stalled in traffic at the intersection of the Ventura and San Diego freeways. They worry about development that dumps even more cars on overtaxed streets. They worry about being able to afford the escalating price of medical insurance.

Valley residents care passionately about all these issues, and yet fewer than half of eligible adults bothered to go to the polls in the 1996 general election. Only 32% of U.S. young people 18 to 24 voted in 1996, according to Rock the Vote, a nonprofit group dedicated to getting out the youth vote.

Candidates for state Assembly and Senate races, granted, aren’t running for seats as locally visible as the neighborhood school board. But state legislators make decisions that affect class size, school funding and the red tape that districts have to go through to get schools built. Decisions are made in Sacramento on busways, open space, health maintenance organization oversight--the very issues voters say they care strongly about.

This year, the lawmakers from the San Fernando Valley who make these decisions will change significantly, due in part to term limits and in part to current officeholders seeking other offices. There are five open Assembly and three open state Senate seats in the Valley area alone.

Faces will change in more ways than one. Both major party candidates in two races are women. Candidates in Valley races include Armenian Americans, Chinese Americans and Latinos.

You can take part in this community conversation about the issues you care about by talking to these candidates, attending community forums and reading the interviews from selected races that are running this month on the Valley Perspective pages.

Most importantly, you can take part in this conversation by voting. The deadline to register is Tuesday.