Recall election important as an exercise in democracy
by Chuck Hoven

(Plain Press, January 2008) On December 18th Ward 14 Councilman Joe Santiago survived a recall attempt led by a couple of small groups of volunteers calling themselves the Committee to Recall Joe Santiago and People for Democracy in Ward 14. Unofficial results released by the Board of Elections on December 19th indicate that out of 1,247 total votes, 498 votes were for the recall of Councilman Joe Santiago (39.94%) and 749 votes were against the recall (60.06%).

The small turnout (unofficially 1255 cards cast out of 15,243 registered voters or 8.2% of the registered voters) was not a good measure of the importance of the campaign and its potential impact on the city of Cleveland and the residents of Ward 14.

In a period of a couple of weeks prior to the recall election in Ward 14, residents in that ward received more attention from Cleveland City Council than they had in years. The Council Leadership Fund contributed substantially to the Committee Against the Recall, and homes of Ward 14 voters were inundated with mailings urging a “no” vote on the recall. Several mailings urging a vote for the recall also were mailed out.


NEWS ANALYSIS

City Council President Martin Sweeney, who called the recall election an attack on all of City Council, delivered on a promise to assist Councilman Santiago is squashing the recall attempt. Members of City Council knocked on doors and served as monitors at polling places. One poll monitor working for the recall effort reported that Council President Sweeney went into the polling booth at Lincoln West High School where the volunteer was monitoring and leafed through the poll book writing down names of people who had not yet voted. A member of the Committee To Recall Joe Santiago challenged this behavior. The committee member said a Board of Elections worker checked with the County Prosecutor’s office, which said Sweeney should not have been allowed access to the polling book. The Plain Dealer reported that Council President Sweeney offered to baby sit for a woman’s children so she could go to the polls and vote against the recall. The woman declined the offer.

While City Council members called the recall a waste of taxpayer dollars, the reported $47,000 cost of the election was less than the $60,000 the Mayor’s office used to buy the silence of former City Council Clerk Emily Lipovan after she had filed charges of sexual harassment against Council President Martin Sweeney.

Ironically, Lipovan, who accepted the buyout and is no longer City Council Clerk, worked in concert with Sweeney to thwart the recall effort. Lipovan served as head of the monitors who watched the poll booths. That too proved to be controversial, as Joe Santiago-the subject of the recall- was serving as a monitor at the polling place at Luther Memorial School on Robert Avenue. When a voter challenged this, the Board of Elections removed Santiago from this role, but not until he had spent several hours in the polling location.

When formally voting to approve the recall election, City Council threatened to change the City Charter to make it more difficult for recall elections to occur in the future. This would be a mistake. More people signed the petition for the recall (808), than voted for the recall (498). This is an indication that many of the voters of Ward 14 felt a strong sense that it was important to have a vote on the recall whether they agreed with the recall or not. One resident of West 48th Street south of Storer Avenue expressed the sentiment that he signed a petition for the recall because he believed people had the right to vote on it, but said he was inclined to give Santiago more time to prove himself.

The election results from the Ward 14 recall election are instructive in a number of ways.


Implications for Santiago

Rather than discounting the recall effort as an attempt by a disgruntled former councilperson (Nelson Cintron, Jr.) to regain power, Councilman Santiago would do well to examine the precinct- by-precinct data to look for areas of his ward where people are particularly dissatisfied and try to determine what can be done to address their concerns.

Of the twenty precincts in Ward 20, thirteen precincts voted against the recall and five precincts voted for the recall. In Precinct B there was a 30-30 tie. In precinct C, nobody voted. (See Ward 14 Map and Chart A)

In all of the precincts where voting occurred, Santiago had some opposition with the exception of precinct D, where only one person voted and that person voted for Santiago.

Most instructive for Santiago would be a look at the five precincts (A, M, P, R & S) where a majority of the voters were for the recall. Precinct A is in the far southwestern portion of Ward 14. The area, between W. 52nd and W. 46th and Carlos and Eichorn, has a proportionally large number of vacant and abandoned houses.

Precincts R & S, situated along a troubled stretch of Clark Avenue where patrons of sometimes-rowdy bars disturb residents on weekends, also provided a majority vote for the recall. Precinct S lies north of Clark Avenue from W. 32 to W. 44th with Erin and Train Avenue as the northern boundary and Clark Avenue at the south. Precinct R is just to the west of S; from Train Avenue north of Clark it stretches west to W. 48th Street. South of Clark it runs from W. 41st to W. 48th. The southern boundary is on Hyde and Bragdon Avenues.

The precinct M, which lies directly across Storer Avenue from the El Tropical Night Club, also voted for the recall. This troubled area along Storer Avenue has several of vacant and abandoned houses and experiences severe disruption from patrons of nightclubs on weekends. One 15-year resident says she is considering going into voluntary foreclosure because of the troublesome El Tropical. She explains that the disruption from the bar has become unbearable and its reputation makes it impossible to sell her home.

In Precinct P, a majority of votes were cast for the recall. It includes the area along Erin and Seymour west of Fulton where residents voiced concerns about the failure to complete the Roberto Clemente playground expansion after longtime residents had surrendered their houses to the threat of eminent domain. They also complained about graffiti in the playground on Seymour, the failure to demolish houses purchased for a planned expansion of Caribe Bakery, and flooding on Erin Avenue. The precinct also includes the Vega-Barber neighborhood east of Fulton where former Ward 14 Councilman Nelson Cintron, Jr., a key organizer of the recall, resides.


Implications for City Council

City Council itself can use this opportunity to examine their behavior and question whether the course of action it has taken over the last few decades has contributed to the concerns raised by residents of Ward 14.

It should reexamine its emphasis on new development and examine ways to improve the lives of long-term residents. It should examine steps it can take to help residents to stave off further foreclosures. Santiago, who has put together a committee to examine ways to modernize the zoning laws and other city laws that govern bars and nightclubs, should continue this effort and find a way to regulate the behavior or close troublesome bars and nightclubs while still maintaining entertainment opportunities in the city where appropriate.


Implications for Board of Elections

The Board of Elections, given the upcoming presidential election, also could gain some insight from the election. How many people believe that in a ward with a population of less than 23,000 people, 15, 243 people are registered to vote? Are there even that many people living in the ward who are age 18 or older? In the last City Council Election, the hotly contested contest between Joe Santiago and Nelson Cintron, Jr., only 2,990 people voted. It would seem a stretch that in such a race over 12,000 people who took the time to register to vote would not show up at the polls. The Board of Elections must do a better job of purging the voting rolls to ensure that people who have died, moved out of the neighborhood, or are among the families who once lived in estimated 700-900 vacant and abandoned houses in the ward are taken off the election books.

For those concerned about getting voters to the polls for important elections it would be good to examine this election as well. With armies of people going door to in Ward 14 trying to persuade people to come out and vote, only 840 people actually voted on December 18th, another 415 had already voted by absentee ballot. Also, the Board of Elections must better education poll workers as to what type of behavior is not acceptable. The idea of someone coming into an election booth and looking at the book to see who hasn’t voted yet, is abhorrent in a democracy.

The Board of Elections should also examine the huge differences in the number of registered voters among the 20 precincts in Ward 14. Precinct D has only five registered voters (one of whom voted in the recall election) and Precinct C has only 14 registered voters, none of whom voted in the recall election. In contrast two Ward 14 precincts, precincts H and M, each have over 1100 registered voters. If we are to take our democratic process seriously, each of the precincts should be roughly equivalent in population. Do not each of these precincts elect a precinct committee person to represent them at the ward club?

Resurrecting the democratic process in Cleveland is important not only for Ward 14, but for the credibility of our election process. Having thousands of dead and long gone people still registered makes voter turnout look smaller than the true count. Let us purge our voter rolls of people who no longer in the ward so we can more accurately gauge the meaning of how people are voting and what degree of apathy is actually present.


CHART A

         
Data from Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

Click here for a precinct map of Ward 14.

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