USC/LA Times Poll: Voters Don’t Ignore Anything on the Ballot

LOS ANGELES — “B” may be the second letter in the alphabet, but Measure B will be at the very end of the ballots of Los Angeles-area voters, which could mean a lot of people don’t vote on it. Not to worry, says the most recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, 88 percent of registered voters plan to vote on every race and issue on the ballot. Whether that bodes well or ill for opponents of the mandatory condom measure remains to be seen, but it certainly means that continuing efforts by proponents and opponents alike to reach the voter remain necessary. The concern about being stuck at the bottom of the ballot is not limited to those who wind up there. According to the Times, “Political strategists are routinely concerned that low billing on the ballot makes candidates and initiatives less likely to pass. “Earlier this year,” the paper added, “millionaire civil rights lawyer Molly Munger sued the state because Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure was going to be placed above hers on Nov. 6. She lost the case.” And both their measures are relatively high on the ballot! Measure B, by contrast, because it is a County measure, is second to last, at least on this writer’s ballot. Still, the pollsters say demerits for “low billing” are minimal. “There may be a marginal advantage from being listed early rather than late,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “But it doesn’t make a huge difference.” Not huge, perhaps, but potentially significant nonetheless. If 12 percent of the County’s 4,724,543 registered voters (as of today) don’t make it to the end of the ballot, that’s 566,945 people not weighing in on issues of consequence. No one expects every registered voter to vote, of course, but as the numbers who do decrease, in a close race the potential consequence of the partial voter may increase. That said, the USC/Times poll didn’t look at Measure B specifically, so vested parties have no choice but to go full bore until the day of the election. That very message was driven home at a recent meeting of members of the adult entertainment industry by James Lee, head of the No on Government Waste Committee, who told the gathering, “You now have to convince 4.2 million voters in LA County, of which 3.1 million actually vote, which means for this measure to be defeated, you have to convince 1.55 million people in this county." He added, “The only way you can reach 1.55 million voters is through television, through pounding the message that we will put out in a TV ad that the LA Times thinks this is crap—and if you ran that every single day on those different channels, you will win this going away.” The No on Government Waste Committee team also stated that when people become aware of an issue, they are more likely to vote on it wherever it is placed on the ballot. The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times poll surveyed 1,504 registered voters by telephone from Oct. 15 to Oct. 21. The margin of error is 2.9 percentage points.