Council Explores Local Election Reforms

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

July 10 -- Heeding the call of Living Wage advocates, the City Council this week took initial steps to crack down on the allegedly dirty and illegal campaign tactics proponents blame for the narrow defeat of Proposition JJ last November.

The 6 to 1 council vote Tuesday night comes less than two weeks after a commission convened by Living Wage supporters issued a report proposing a series of measures that would avert the kind of "deceptions" -- including violation of slate mailer law -- proponents allegedly engaged in.

“The issue brought before us tonight is about how we perceive democracy and how we intend to carry our democracy into the future,” said Mayor Richard Bloom. “The deceptive campaign material gets worse and worse and worse with every election.

“We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our constituents, and we owe it to this democratic forum that we all agree as citizens to participate in, to move forward with this and seriously consider these recommendations,” Bloom said.

The “deceitful tactics” employed by the City’s hotel industry, a commission spokesperson told the council, represent “the most egregious examples” of a spreading trend in California ballot measure politics that is rotting the democratic process at its core.

“I think there are a number of things that we need to act upon that are not a question of what this particular campaign did in abridgment of the law,” said commission co-chair Xandra Kayden, a board member of the National League of Women Voters.

“But I think we need to recognize that this has become a complicated issue in California," Kayden said. "This case is a particularly egregious case but it’s not alone.”

The council directed staff to study the commission's key recommendations, which include creating stricter disclosure requirements for slate mailers, instituting a three-strikes law for consultants who repeatedly break those requirements and forming a Santa Monica Ethics Commission and an Election Watch Commission.

Titled “Democracy Distorted: A Report on Electoral Deception and Manipulation by Opponents of the Santa Monica Living Wage,” the commission's 42-page report focused three “blatantly deceptive mailers” sent out the weekend before the election.

Distributed by organizations established less than two weeks before voters went to the polls, the mailers falsely suggested that the Democratic Party, pro-choice leaders and educators opposed the living wage, the report alleged.

Council member Pam O’Connor said the issue comes down to a “buyer beware” dynamic in politics, where “we need to know where they’re (the mailers) coming from.”

“The voter needs to make educated decisions about how they’re going to vote, just like buyers," O'Connor said. "But if there are people out there who are employing deceptive practices, there needs to be some protections in the system.”

Councilman Bob Holbrook, however, called the commission's allegations “sour grapes.”

“I’ve seen every Democrat who has ever run for office in Santa Monica on a Republican slate mailer, and I’ve seen every Republican on a Democratic slate mailer, and I’ve seen the bending of every rule, and sometimes the voters just decide it" Holbrook said.

“I just have to say it sounds like sour grapes. We got to get over the fact that if we loose an election that we’ve got to explain how it could have happened and that it must be somebody else’s fault. It comes down to one thing. Would these people be here tonight, would there be a commission, if they won? Simple.”

Holbrook insisted that the commission was cherry picking self-serving problems in the political system to justify its own case and that it was a “waste” of the City’s time to formulate legal reforms because the problem is too big to solve.

In addition to the mailers, the report also charges that opponents gave the false impression that poor Latinos opposed the unprecedented measure by hiring day laborers to stand on street corners holding “No on JJ” signs.

It also alleges that opponents misled voters into signing qualifying petitions to force a vote on the living wage law approved by the City Council that would have required private businesses in the coastal zone to pay workers at least $10.50 an hour plus benefits.

“Maybe we should look at all the evidence which leads to other problems,” said Holbrook. “Frankly, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”