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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

Welcome to Civic Circus, this is Ankur Patel breaking down local politics, going to three hour meetings so you don’t have to. This week I am going to give you a report on the municipal elections held on November 8th.

Some people may have already forgotten what they voted for, and based on the 13.8% voter turnout, here is a quick background.

With over 500 political districts and 4,300,000 registered voters, Los Angeles County is some of the most complicated political geography in the country. With federal, state, county, and city government already confusing enough to most people, we have to remember school and water districts have their own elected officials as well.

There were 82 elected bodies in Los Angeles County holding some sort of election on November 8th. 6 community colleges; 14 elementary schools; 4 high schools; 28 unified school districts; 10 water districts; and 20 cities; all electing different positions from city councilman and school board member to mayor.

To give a bird’s eye view, the size of the cities, in terms of registered voters, ranges widely, from Hawaiian gardens with 4,042, to Palmdale City with 60,000. But, again, the county as a whole saw a voter turnout of 13.8%.

One of the elections that stood out was El Monte, as its 32,856 registered voters turned out to vote at a phenomenal clip of 32.1%. In this spirited campaign for city council, 6 candidates were separated by a few hundred votes and in an election where 22,000 people did not exercise their ability to vote, the difference between 1st and 2nd was only 7 votes.

But let’s focus on the million dollar race for the billion dollar seat in Los Angeles City’s Council District 15 (CD 15). The race for CD15 saw15 separate candidates raise money, 11 of which qualified for the ballot.

Even though November 8th was just the primary, the candidates have already spent a combined $1,400,000 while an additional $596,000 in independent expenditures has been made for this seat that has jurisdiction over the port of Los Angeles. The truly amazing part of the election was the fact that this $2,000,000 campaign saw only 18,247 ballots cast. That’s over $100 per vote.

The two candidates that will square up in the general election are Warren Furutani who used $313,000 to get 4,098 votes – that is $76 dollars a vote, and Joe Buscaino who used $264,000 and benefited from $147,000 in independent expenditures, to take 5,175 votes.

Independent expenditures make it more difficult to calculate who is running the most efficient campaign, but there were some clearly inefficient campaigns like Pat McCosker’s, which had a total of $619,000 spent on its behalf and earned 1,779 votes – that’s $348 a vote!

Getting money out of politics is important, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t vote. There were a total of 226,966 ballots cast out of a possible 1,645,524 in Los Angeles County. That is a voter turnout of 13.8%.

Perhaps at the presidential level the term peanut gallery is befitting, but the city council and state legislature are occupiable.