The Process of Empowerment : In L.A., only 43% voted: The best governance requires much deeper involvement by citizens

Empowerment is too recently hatched a word to show up in any except the newest dictionaries, but its meaning is readily apparent. In a political context, it refers to the process by which people gain some control over their own lives, to the point where they can reasonably expect that they and their interests will be paid attention to by government. Empowerment is not a gift handed down from on high. It is not an automatic entitlement, issued free of charge with birth certificates or drivers’ licenses. It is a process that grows out of a right, the right of all citizens over the age of 18 to vote in their country’s elections.

The process of empowerment, then, begins in the voting booth. It begins with the recognition that, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” To put that same noble thought more crudely, it begins with the knowledge that elected officials listen more to the people who may have put them in office and who can vote them out than to people who can’t be bothered to cast a ballot.

This week’s mayoral election in Los Angeles proved to be one more in a long chain of municipal elections in which fewer than half the eligible voters took the trouble to vote. The 43% who did were not, typically, representative of the general population. Non-Latino whites, who make up 42% of the city’s voting-age population and 65% of its registered voters, cast fully 72% of the ballots, much of that coming in the San Fernando Valley. Blacks, 13% of the voting-age population and 21% of registered voters, cast 12% of the ballots last Tuesday. Latinos, 34% of the voting-age group but only 11% of the total registration, were 10% of the turnout. Asians, 11% of the voting-age population and only 3% of total registration, cast 4% of the ballots.

A lot of eligible voters, then, simply disenfranchised themselves, as voters across the country have tended to do in discouraging if not alarming numbers in recent decades. (Last year’s presidential election, which saw a 73% turnout of eligible voters in Los Angeles, was a welcome exception.)

Just why people shun voting remains a matter of endless and often self-serving debate. Of course people have grown cynical about politicians and their well-honed ability to promise vastly more than they are able to deliver. For all that, government remains an essential and vital force in our lives, and what government does still depends very much on how people vote. Not voting doesn’t punish politicians or contribute in any way to changing the political system. Not voting is instead a self-wounding act, undercutting the claim to be heard and heeded. It is a willing forfeiture of the very empowerment that so many today seek.