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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies. This week on Uprising I’m going to take a look at one of our most precious resources: Water.

So far about 120 candidates have filed to run for 53 offices within Los Angeles County in the June 5th primary. The deadline to get on the ballot is February 23rd.

This primary election is going to be particularly important because of Proposition 14, dubbed the “top two primary”, which gained voter approval in June 2010. Proposition 14 dramatically changes the election process in the state of California, with the June primary being the first major election to implement the new system.

During previous primaries, different candidates from the same party — Democrat, Republican, Green, Peace & Freedom, Libertarian, and American Independent – could compete to see who would represent their respective parties in the November election.

Now, all candidates from all parties run against each other in the primary with the top two vote getters moving onto the general election, which is sometimes referred to as a runoff. We saw what this looks like in the special election for the 36th congressional district when Janice Hahn won a runoff against Chris Huey after a primary race that boasted over 10 candidates. More recently, we saw the top two primary’s effects during Los Angeles City’s race for City Council District 15 where the primary winnowed a field of 11 candidates down to Warren Furatani and Joe Buscaino in the general election.

In non-partisan races, like the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, if any candidate takes more than 50% of the vote in the primary, there is NO runoff. Congressional offices and State Legislatures are partisan offices, meaning that if someone takes more than 50% of the vote in the primary, the top two will still have to face each other in the November election.

In addition to the three county board of supervisor seats that will be voted on in the June Primary, Los Angeles County will be voting for 18 members of the House of Representatives, 1 US Senator, 7 state senators, 24 state assembly members, and approximately 151 superior court judges.

Many of the candidates that have filed to run for office, will not qualify for the ballot because they will fail to collect enough signatures in lieu of a filing fee. The filing fee to run for the House of Representatives is $1,740 or 3,000 signatures of registered voters in the district, while state senate and state assembly are slightly easier to qualify for.

Many third parties feel that the top-two-primary system was designed to even further marginalize them by not making ballot access much more difficult in the general election. But my broader take on this is that our electoral process is designed to be confusing to all people.

For example, rampant redistricting adds a new level of complexity to elections every ten years. I attended a Los Angeles City redistricting commission meeting last week at Pierce College. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but at each level of government redistricting has its own unique process that continues to consolidate power into the hands of the politically connected by balkanizing, dividing, and gerrymandering us.

And they will continue to try to divide us, and that is why KPFK is such an important source of information. Please support KPFK by calling in and donating what you can.

If we don’t pay attention to the races, the candidates, and the electoral process itself, we play into the two party binary, and may end up choosing the lesser of two evils rather than our favorite candidates, which can only lead us down a crooked path.