By the morning after the March 3rd LA City Council primary election, Carolyn Ramsay and David Ryu had garnered the most votes for District 4, with citywide voter turnout simmering out at 8.6 percent. This will almost certainly send Ramsay and Ryu to the runoff election on May 19.
Ramsay, the former aide to outgoing councilman Tom LaBonge, led the pack with 2,911 votes, totaling just over 15 percent of the day’s count. Community health director Ryu was right behind, with 2,776 votes.
“We ran a grassroots campaign to protect the character of neighborhoods, fix our infrastructure, and create good-paying local jobs through the Hollywood Innovation Zone,” Ramsay said to the Los Angeles Daily News on Tuesday night.
Just under 19,000 voters cast ballots in the District 4 election, a sprawling area reaching from Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake holding roughly 250,000 residents. The city as a whole saw more than a 50 percent drop from the last primary two years ago, which had a 23 percent turn out. That year also coincided with mayoral election.
Some voters who did come out on Tuesday attributed the dismal attendance to residents either not being aware of the elections, or just not caring.
“Today’s election — I don’t think people know about it,” said Bryant Rolle, a Los Feliz resident. “They don’t really care about the primaries. Maybe after the run off there will be a better turn out.”
Both Ryu and Ramsay raised the most campaign funds throughout the election season, with the former raising more than $400,000 and the latter closing out at $302,000.
Richard Close, the president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowner’s Association, told USC Annenberg digital publication Neon Tommy last month that campaign contributions would most likely dictate the election’s turn out — something appeared to prove true as results continued to be counted Wednesday.
“[This election is about] focusing in on those candidates in the 4th district who have the most money to communicate their message,” Close said. “We all like to believe the unknown person with no money can win, but in a district this large, with over 260,000 residents, you really need substantial money to get your message out.”
Charter amendments 1 and 2 also passed with more than 70 percent approval. These called for city elections to coincide with state and federal elections in June and November, rather than March and May.
District 4, which held a ticket of 14 candidates, proved to be the only one in the city headed for a May runoff. The other five districts which voted this time round, elected their representatives by 50 percent of the vote or more, the amount needed to avoid the runoff. Three of those five successful candidates received fewer than 10,000 votes.
Some voters on Tuesday said that the congested ticket for District 4 posed an unrealistic amount of choice and campaign information for residents to comb through.
“Who can look up all 14 people and narrow it down?” said Stephen Schilling, a Silver Lake resident. “It’s crazy, people don’t have time for that. That’s why they don’t vote.“
Los Feliz resident Gail Slater said she was taught at a young age that voting is a civic duty.
“You can’t complain if you don’t vote,” she said. “I have friends who are always complaining. I know they don’t vote and I tell them, ‘shut up, you got what you deserve.’”
