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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently approved a plan for redistricting that essentially maintains the existing districts and constituencies, only one of which (the First District) is predominantly Latino and has a Latino representative. A challenge to this plan with the US Attorney General's Civil Rights Division is currently pending, wherein the Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Association (LACCEA) has offered its own plan for redistricting. In the alternative plan, districts are drawn in a way intended to preserve communities of interest, and to facilitate the election of a second Latino candidate of interest from the San Gabriel Valley (the Third District). We evaluate both plans on the dimension of how each will influence individual Latino voter turnout, and hence the ability of Latinos to influence electoral outcomes. Using Registrar of Voters data for the universe of registered voters in Los Angeles County, we offer several summary statistics and probit analyses that show that the alternate plan proposed by the LACCEA is superior to the Status Quo plan approved by the County. Specifically, Latinos will be able to affect electoral outcomes in District 3 under the LACCEA plan, and maintain their ability to influence electoral outcomes in District 1. Under the Status Quo plan, Latinos will be limited to affecting outcomes in the First District only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly forty years after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a fundamental question remains unanswered: Although all citizens have an equal right to the ballot, do all citizens enjoy equal access to the ballot box? That is, are voting precincts in predominantly low-income and non-White neighborhoods, less visible, less stable, harder to find, and harder to navigate than voting precincts in high-income and predominantly White neighborhoods? If so, does the lower quality result in lower levels of voting, all other things equal? In order to assess the accessibility and quality of polling places across the city?s diverse neighborhoods, students researchers at Loyola Marymount University visited randomly selected voting precincts where they completed a carefully designed 30-point checklist and used cameras to document their findings. Our analysis indicates the quality of polling places varies across the diverse neighborhoods of Los Angeles and that the quality of polling places impacts voter turnout. Low-income and minority communities tended to have ?lower quality? precincts, which tended to depress voter turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisan gerrymandering has long been used to secure the election and reelection of candidates from particular political parties. While there can be no doubt that efforts along these lines have been successful, questions arise concerning how this tool influences the political behavior of constituents in the affected districts. One element of this secondary effect concerns the mobilization prospects of potential co-partisan electorates. Reformers of the electoral system have often claimed that the creation of safe partisan seats drives down voter turnout, in ways that can significantly shape the electorate for up-ballot elections. That is, while virtually ensuring the partisanship of the winner, such districts may result in the suppression of voter turnout by reducing the incentive to turnout in safe districts. In this effort, we assess whether gerrymandered districts suppress voter turnout by removing the incentive to vote or whether members of the advantaged party turn out as part of the winning team. To estimate the influence of partisan majority districts on individual level voter turnout, we compare the actual turnout of voters over multiple elections. The data utilized is a universe of registered voters in five California counties - Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Ventura, and Riverside, as of December 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of homeownership upon public policy attitudes and quality of life assessments for individuals in Southern California. We find that status as a homeowner does appreciably influence individual attitudes. Further, our results show that homeownership status may trump race/ethnic identification in attitude formation in Southern California [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]