A new study of voter participation in Orange County reveals that, as the November Presidential nears, minorities, youths, and other key groups are being systematically abandoned by the electoral process, The Black, Latino and Puerto Rican Alliance for Justice, authors of the study said Tuesday.
The Alliance will hold a Press Conference tomorrow, Wednesday, September 26, outside the Orange County Administration Building to detail their findings.
The study’s findings are based on voter participation, or lack thereof, in the August Primary Elections. Similar outcomes were revealed following the Orlando elections, which the Alliance also studied.
Among the findings of the most recent study are, in minority majority Orange County, over 65% of the voters were non-Hispanic whites and just 6% of all voters under the age of 35 participated in the elections.
Back in April, the group sounded alarm bells and urged Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer to take action with regard to the alienation among certain voting blocks, including minorities and youth, but to no avail. At that time the question, “Is Democracy Collapsing?,” asked by the group, was met with deafening silence from the political leadership.
According to the Alliance, the study of the August primaries in which School Board and County Commission Candidates were considered on non-partisan ballots, yielded results equally pathetic in terms of the low levels of participation, even declining from previous years for County-wide elections in August.
At tomorrow’s press conference, the Alliance will call upon all local elected officials to become engaged in solving the limited voter participation which threatens democracy in Orange County. In particular, the group will stress the empty leadership of Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs at the event.
The Alliance will also make available copies of a letter to all Orange County Elected Officials, calling upon them to join together to address the problem and proposing a future time-table for action.
The group plans to undertake a similar study following the elections in November.
