It turns out that who isn’t voting may have just as much, or more, to do with who wins an election that who does vote. Certainly that was the case in the recent special election in Orange County to fill the vacated First District Supervisor seat, created when Supervisor Janet Nguyen was elected last November to the California State Senate, vacating her county position.
The Los Angeles Times has done an analysis of the election results in this low-turnout special election in central Orange County, and while the information presented is not necessarily surprising, it is most certainly disappointing–to the extent that higher voter turnout is one indicator of a healthy democratic republic.
The First Supervisorial District is at the heart of Orange County’s “political doughnut”–the doughnut hole being this Republican-plurality county’s Democrat turf. Back in the 1998 the irrepressible Congressman Bob Dornan, the Irish-American firebrand, lost re-election to political unknown Democrat Loretta Sanchez, and since then Central Orange County has produced a lot of Democrat lawmakers.
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