California voters, nonvoters worlds apart

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The growing diversity of California's population isn't showing up in the voting booth, where people who are richer, older and whiter than their nonvoting neighbors are making the decisions that will shape the state's future, a new study shows.

Further, the plans and priorities of the Californians most likely to vote and those of the nearly 50 percent of adults who don't participate in elections are as different as their bank accounts and racial backgrounds, said Mark Baldassare, a pollster who conducted the study released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

"About 15 percent of adult people make the decisions, and that 15 percent doesn't look much like California overall," he said. "And that's even more problematic here because so much public policy is made at the ballot box via initiatives."

Remember the words of the late Mayor Richard J.Daley "those who don't vote don't count".