San Jose rejects proposal to shift mayoral election

Council splits on move to presidential election years when turnout is higher

Despite heavy support from political science researchers and an array of community groups, a move to shift mayoral elections in San Jose to presidential election years when voter turnout is higher failed to get traction among the city’s elected leaders.

After deferring the item several times in recent months, the City Council in a split vote on Tuesday shot down the proposal to move mayoral elections as advocates like council members Magdalena Carrasco, Sergio Jimenez and Maya Esparza argued the shift would boost the number of people casting a vote for mayor and make the city’s government more reflective of the views of all residents.

But opponents, including Mayor Sam Liccardo and Vice Mayor Chappie Jones — who originally supported the proposal but flipped to join

the mayor — argued such a shift would allow national politics to overshadow the mayor’s race and disadvantage districts whose elections take place during gubernatorial election years. It also could have added two years to Liccardo’s term.

The discussion, which ultimately pitted the council’s Latino members against their peers, was tense and at times deeply emotional.

“Let’s be really honest here,” said Esparza, who coauthored a memo in support of the idea. “The five brown people on this council are saying this is something that will encourage the empowerment of voters.”

Had it passed, the city could have put the question on a ballot for voters to decide.

Instead, the council voted to create a working group to consider ways to boost voter turnout, particularly in precincts where turnout is low, in all elections.

The idea of shifting the mayoral election drew backing from everyone

from Ann Ravel, the former Federal Election Commission chair, to Richard Konda, the executive director of the Asian Law Alliance.

“We should do everything we can to encourage greater civic engagement,” Ravel said.

In a letter earlier this year, Adrian Gonzales, the chair of San Jose’s Board of Fair Campaign and Political Practices, which endorsed the proposed shift, pointed out that from 1980 to 2018, voter turnout in the city was around 13 percent higher in presidential general elections than in gubernatorial general elections.

But Liccardo and Jones had pushed back at the notion that changing the election timing would improve things.

“Simply changing the election cycle for one of the eleven members of the San Jose City Council will not fix the needed improvement in civic engagement for elections in all eleven council districts, and for five of them, it will make things worse,” the pair wrote.

San Jose State University political science professor Garrick Percival believes that’s backward, and that

higher engagement during presidential years might translate into more engagement in off years, too.

“Voting and engaging and participating leads to more civic education,” Percival said.

And Carrasco argued, “Council races are very personal.”

It’s the intimate, personal conversations the candidates have with residents, she argued, that brings people to polls.

Esparza agreed, pointing out that when she won her District 7 race in the fall of 2018, the mayor’s race had been decided much earlier, during the June primary.

But, she said, residents — disproportionately lowincome residents and people of color — can face burdens such as multiple work shifts that make it difficult to vote.

That’s no accident, Percival said.

Holding elections during non-presidential years, he said, is “a product of trying to restrict access to the ballot … our current arrangement is not apolitical.”

Yet in his own memo, Councilman Lan Diep said residents bear some of the responsibility for showing

up.

“People who care vote,” Diep said. “While there are certainly systemic barriers to voting in many parts of this country, those barriers have been greatly reduced in California. To the extent such barriers still exist in Santa Clara County, they exist equally in both midterm and presidential year

elections. The only reasonable explanation for the variation in voter turnout between gubernatorial and presidential year elections is voter interest.”

Council members Pam Foley and Dev Davis, who joined the mayor, Jones, Diep and Johnny Khamis in opposition to putting the proposal on the ballot,

said they hoped the 2020 mail-in ballot would help increase voter turnout and remove barriers to voting, along with voter education efforts.

“If we are able to increase turnout,” Davis said, “that benefits all districts.”