For Shame, Non-Latino No-Shows

I’m not sure if it was ever a direct order from my father, who drove a bread truck and paid Teamster dues, but I learned at an early age to never back down from a fight.

So I’m revisiting my Friday column about last week’s humiliating voter turnout in Los Angeles, city of the future.

I won’t say I was wrong in calling Latino turnout a big disappointment, but I must confess with great regret that I missed a chance to say even worse things about non-Latinos.

This is the whole point of writing three columns a week, though. Eventually, you work everyone in.

But before we all head out to the woodshed, a quotation is in order.

What we call experience is often a dreadful list of ghastly mistakes.

--Dr. J. Chalmers Da Costa, “The Trials and Triumphs of the Surgeon”

Smart guy, but thank God he wasn’t my doctor.

In the Friday column, I inadvertently said 34% of the registered voters in the city are white and 41% Hispanic.

What I meant to say was that 34% of eligible voters are white and 41% Hispanic, and yet Latinos accounted for only 22% of the turnout.

Harry Pachon, of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, was among those who called. Getting Latino voters to register is a huge problem, he said. But among all registered voters, Latinos actually had a higher turnout than non-Latinos.

Citywide, 36% of eligible voters cast ballots Tuesday. Among registered Latinos, the number was between 38% and 41%, according to estimates based on exit polls.

When 60% or more of the voting public stays home in a historic election, I don’t think there’s a great deal for anyone to celebrate. But I can understand why Pachon and others were encouraged by a higher Latino turnout than ever, and why they felt as though I had rained on their parade.

“About 20.5% of all registered voters are Latino, and 22.8% of all votes cast were by Latinos,” says Antonio Gonzalez, who’s with the Southwest Voter Registration Project. “It’s a very important figure.”

Gonzalez also disputes another number I used.

The National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials had told me that of the 1.1 million Latino adults in L.A. in 1998, 554,818 were citizens. Gonzalez says his best estimate is that today, 419,000 are citizens.

So by his calculation, 70% of eligible Latinos are registered to vote, rather than 50%. His implication is that there’s much more civic involvement among Latino citizens than I had suggested.

Fair enough, but whether for lack of citizenship or lack of interest, let me repeat that in a city of 1.1 million adult Latinos, only about 130,000 voted. And this was an election in which Antonio Villaraigosa, who lost by fewer than 40,000 votes, would have been the first Latino mayor in 129 years.

The challenge, says Gonzalez, is to bring more Latinos into full citizenship. But because of various obstacles, including federal government sloth in the processing of applications, it won’t be easy.

“Villaraigosa ran out of Mexicans, to put it bluntly,” Gonzalez says.

Now I’m really lost. I didn’t think that was possible in L.A. Good thing we’ve got as many as we do, or our overall turnout would have been even more of an embarrassment. Which brings me to the rest of the electorate.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve got a decent excuse for missing out on this election. My wife and I just moved here, unpacked a few boxes, and found out we’d missed the registration deadline.

Most of you are registered. But where were you on Tuesday?

It was kind of a nice day as I recall. So what did you guys do? Go surfing? Buff the Land Rover? Did Denny’s run a discount on the patty melt?

Compared to the 1993 mayoral election, white turnout took a plunge, while Latino voting spiked.

People around the world have died for the right to punch a ballot. Here in L.A., we probably had more people in liposuction last week than we had at the polls. What do we have to do, rig it so you can vote by cell phone?

We’re redesigning the very idea of what a city is, the whole world is watching, and nearly two-thirds of non-Latinos couldn’t take 10 minutes to vote.

I don’t care how long you’ve been here. America is a participatory experiment, folks. Take a clue from the Latino community, which has begun its political awakening, and love it or leave it.