|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A group of residents, Palo Alto Neighborhoods (PAN), is hoping some of the more than 14,000 people who cast a ballot Nov. 3 will share how they decided which Palo Alto City Council candidates to vote for in the election.
A 17-question survey, which is posted online, queries voters on the information sources they used to learn about the candidates; whether and how they accessed video resources (on cable TV, Internet); how they cast their ballot (in person; by mail and by what date; dropped off mail-in ballots) and more.
Survey results will be shared with the public and will help future candidates, according to Doug Moran, a leader of the neighborhood group.
The data “can be used by candidates in future elections to better allocate their time and money to get better information to voters,” the survey states in its introduction.
The feedback could give candidates helpful information about campaign methods, such as mailing brochures or sending volunteers out to campaign door-to-door, Moran said.
“The cost of doing mail-out is so staggering. That’s a big question for candidates,” Moran said. “Is it effective? Do people read it?”
As for door-to-door campaigning, “It’s an incredible time-sink,” he said.
The expense of mounting a campaign deters qualified people from seeking a council seat, said Moran, who considered a run for council himself in 2005.
“The number I’ve heard bandied about is you can’t have a serious campaign with less than $20,000, and you probably want to look at $30,000,” Moran said.
Fourteen people vied for five open seats this year. All of the winning candidates raised a minimum of $14,000 in cash.
The survey is not the first undertaken to assess Palo Alto voters’ decision-making. In 2007, three campaign advisers developed a similar questionnaire and distributed it through campaign teams, community leaders, neighborhood associations and former elected officials, according to a survey summary.
About 350 people responded, but the group included a large percentage of people associated with the campaigns. That fact skewed the results, Moran said.
This time, the sponsors hope the sample will be larger and more representative of the general voting population. In particular, the group would like to hear from voters who did not work on a campaign and who are younger than 65, Moran said.
So far, about 80 people have taken the survey, mostly from the Barron Park and Crescent Park neighborhoods, he said. One trend he’s seen: The majority of voters preferred the Internet over cable TV when watching re-broadcast candidates’ forums.
The online survey will be posted through Thanksgiving, Moran said.
A printed version can also be completed (see link, below) and mailed back to him at 790 Matadero Road, Palo Alto, CA 94306.
View the survey (PDF)
This survey seems to focus on the distribution of information, but not content of the information. While distribution is important, certainly what is being said must also be important, if there is going to be a link between the propaganda being put out by candidates and election results (and hopefully in good government).
There was an opinion piece in the Daily Post recently pointing out that, in the opinion of the author, the mailers had virtually nothing in them (in terms of content) other than “more of the same.” The author felt that nothing of substance appeared in the mailers, or any other election propaganda/collateral materials that were available to the public. Sadly, this is nothing new. Anyone who has saved a collection of these campaign materials over the years recognizes that they typically could have been written by one person, and they all seem to have the same theme:
“I want to be on the City Council because I love Palo Alto”
“I’m for the schools”
“I’m for the environment”
“I’m for the children”
In short, just more: “Blah, Blah, Blah!”
It would be really great to see a instance candidates tell us that he/she has:
Read the budget recently
Some idea about budget trends over the past 10 years
Read the charter
Some idea of what the zoning codes look like
For the most part, City Councils are about making budget and land-use decisions.. Certainly from the materials we’ve seen in this last election, virtually none of these candidates provided much information about their knowledge of these two key areas.
So, if we can get some useful material out of the survey .. that’s nice. But this survey will not provide voters any hope of seeing valuable, content-driven mailers and election material in the in the future. Perhaps another survey is in order to determine the public’s perception of the quality, and value, of the material being delivered through the current distribution schemes.
Been there done that has hit it on the head.
From reading all the flyers and brochures we received I got the distinct impression that all the candidates were terrified of taking a stand on any possibly meaningful issue for fear some other candidate would pounce on it and “go negative”. So they all looked like they were written by the same PR flack.
As the primary author of the survey, I am interested in feedback on the comment above “Perhaps another survey is in order to determine the public’s perception of the quality, and value, of the material being delivered through the current distribution schemes.”
The survey asks you to rate the various information sources as little/no use to very useful. I intended this to capture “quality and value”. It was phrased this way to capture these aspect in _practical_ terms (rather than abstract assessments). If you misinterpreted this, what did you see the questions as and how might they have been better posed?
Aside: From a quick peek at the early results, the respondents are expressing great dissatisfaction with many of the sources as being vacuous.
Re: JerryL
Candidates are not afraid of other candidates “going negative” on them.
What one hears over and over from candidates is that they are running _for_ office, not against each other, and they take this to extremes. When I have tried to get candidates to compare their position on an issue to that of other candidates, they refuse, claiming that that would be “negative campaigning”.
So we have a system in which the newspapers, the officials and the rest of the political establishment label any and all candidates as “highly qualified”.
— Douglas Moran of Barron Park (the program has decided to identify me as user “Array”)
> If you misinterpreted this, what did you see the questions as
> and how might they have been better posed?
I found the questions kind of naïve. At a minimum, seventeen questions can hardly provide much insight into the information flow of even a small community.
Also, the fundamental problem of why most people don’t vote can not be deduced (or understood) from these questions, either. Palo Alto’s demographic is such that maybe as many as 50% of the residents are renters, and/or not US citizens (who can’t vote). Exactly what the numbers are isn’t known, but the fact that only about 30% vote for Council elections is a well-established fact. So, trying to figure out why those who are registered don’t vote would be a useful bit of research which doesn’t fall out of these seventeen questions.
There have been some significant increases in information distribution in the last five years. Youtube, kind of “weird” when it first appeared, now boasts one billion “hits” a day. Yet, few (if any) of the candidates seem to be aware of this technology, or used it to get their message out. The Weekly did have video on its web-site of the candidates, however. It might have been interesting to inquire if people used this opportunity to learn more about the candidates and if survey respondents had come to a decision to vote on a candidate from this experience. Social networking via Facebook has become surprisingly popular with older people. Twitter has become useful in any number of ways for communicating with people. Yet, it’s unlikely that any of the candidates used this free communications channel to reach voters. The “push” vs “pull” nature of “old” vs “new” media explains part of this situation. It takes a while for people to go to web-sites, but mailers/newspaper advertisements puts the material in people’s faces (if they are willing to read it). Given that many of the candidates didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting elected, it’s understandable that they didn’t want to put a lot of money into these communications efforts.
> respondents are expressing great dissatisfaction with
> many of the sources as being vacuous.
This information must have come from the type-ins. Obviously, this seems to be a positive by-product of the survey, and reinforces the main point of the first posting criticizing the survey. It will be interesting to see how this survey result will be packaged so that the next election’s collateral material will less “vacuous” than this one’s.
To summarize, the survey was too short, and issues associated with content should not be peripheral to such a survey–which might be important enough to justify a “study”.