All but two homes in this South Merced neighborhood have been foreclosed on, a neighbor says. Hook ups in this empty lot mark where another home was never built. (Photo: Rachel Dornhelm)

At a suburban development in South Merced, sidewalks and electrical hook ups are signs that houses were to be built here. At one of the first full blocks of homes, I knock and Dina Gonzalez opens the door. She runs an in-home day care, her bright personality matches the center’s primary colored walls.

But stepping outside she grows more somber. Gonzalez points at a row of neat stucco houses and says that nearly all of them have been foreclosed on.

“Just me and the person at the end is the ones that kinda saved our home,” Gonzalez says. “But back there, the other line, most of these three lines, most of the people is new. … Across the street this family lost their house, and she lost her job, too. So she couldn’t afford — not even rent an apartment. So they didn’t have no choice. They were looking, living in shelters on the street by the train.

Gonzalez says she was lucky and got a loan modification. But she’s seen other home day-care providers fold, as families lost jobs and moved away. In the midst of all the upheaval, Gonzalez could see voting was the last thing on people’s minds.

“A lot of the parents and a lot of people in the community start feeling discouraged. They didn’t feel trust in the economy and the system, and it’s kinda hard to be picking up and feeling trust in the White House.”

Gonzalez herself is politically engaged. She has political signs on her lawn and tried organizing neighbors to sign a petition to help renters being evicted from foreclosed properties. But she’s more the exception.

I visited this neighborhood with Sheila Petersen, a recent UC Merced graduate with longtime ties to the town. Petersen saw the distress in this community when she documented the effects of the foreclosure crisis as part of a University study. She says from her own hard experience she knows: being an engaged citizen can be a luxury.

“When you live in a less than ideal environment, you tend to put your head down, dig in, and just live your life,” Petersen says, “because you’re just busy dealing with your everyday concerns. You don’t have time to perhaps even imagine a better world, because the bills need paying, the baby needs shoes, and it’s time to cook dinner.”

Now two UC Riverside professors have published a report that showed that in neighborhoods with a high foreclosure rate people were less likely to turn out to vote. They crunched numbers from the 2008 election and found that losing a house had an effect on voting as strong as poverty or a lack of education.

Co-author Martin Johnson says displacement from foreclosures compounds existing obstacles to voting. ”This does disproportionately affect communities of color, lower income communities,” he says, “and these are communities that are already at participation disadvantages.”

The foreclosure effect is just one of many factors that can impact a race on the margins. But given how hard California has been hit by the mortgage meltdown, Johnson says, it could swing some races.

“Certainly at the local level where we have more competitive elections — sometimes that are lower turnout — these patterns of depressing turnout could have an effect on some outcomes,” he says.

The study was conducted across California and, in West Oakland, didn’t surprise resident Donna Terry. Sitting at the kitchen table in her shotgun bungalow, she says she has volunteered with a group that tries to register voters.

“We have had different community based events. People walk through but don’t engage,” Terry says. “And I think, I know for sure, it has to do with the displacement of people. I mean people are weary.”

Foreclosures can leave people focused on survival. If they wind up renting they may have less stake in their new communities. They may not be thinking about registering to vote at a new address. The community fabric can fray when the human connections are lost. Terry says on her block, in the shadow of the historic Mt. Zion Missionary Church there are only two longtime residents left.

“You’ve got to talk one-on-one, so you can tell me that my neighbor perhaps is having health issues and needs a ride. Or her car is in the shop,” Terry says. “So you know I can ask when I go to vote, you want me to give you a ride? So you have to engage with people. You have to see what going on.”

California gets better marks than many states for ensuring people can still vote even if they’ve lost their homes, but it’s still an uphill climb.

More: Tips for voters faced with foreclosure

Listen to Rachel Dornhelm’s story:

(David Paul Morris/Getty Images)

While Republican voter registration in California is in a long downward spiral, the GOP still holds sway in 31 of the state’s 58 counties.

Then there’s Riverside County, where Democratic activists claim that a Republican voter outreach project has employed an unusual fraud scheme to build a 51,000-voter registration advantage.

In a complaint filed last week with the county registrar of voters, the Democrats presented affidavits from 133 Democratic voters who said they had been re-registered as Republicans without their consent after they encountered petition circulators outside welfare offices and stores.

One voter complained that his registration was changed to Republican after he signed what he thought was a petition to legalize marijuana. Another said he was told he was signing a petition to lower the price of gasoline, according to the affidavits.

Others said they were offered free cigarettes or a “job at the polls” if they signed some paperwork.

Also among the Democrats who said they were involuntarily re-registered as Republicans: two aides to retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Roth, a Democrat locked in a tight race with Republican Assemblyman Jeff Miller for a state Senate seat.

Many of the complainants were Latino or African American.

Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for the Democratic Party’s voter registration efforts, said Republican signature collectors might have improperly re-registered thousands of Riverside County Democrats. Maviglio blamed a GOP registration committee, the Golden State Voter Participation Project.

Ashley Giovannettone, spokeswoman for the project, said that it has a “zero tolerance” policy on registration fraud.

“Registering Democrats as Republican doesn’t help our cause,” she said.

The GOP has reported a nearly 35,000-voter surge in registrations this year, according to county records. Records show the voter participation project has paid more than $200,000 to the firms that have been conducting GOP voter registration drives in Riverside County. Charles Munger, a Stanford University physicist and emerging GOP megadonor, gave the project $241,000.

Maviglio contended that by padding their registration numbers, Republicans could get a fundraising boost because prospective donors would view local races as more winnable.

Re-registering Democrats as Republicans also interferes with Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, he said, because the party won’t contact a voter who is listed as a Republican.

Some of the Democratic voters who filed complaints suggested another motive, noting that petition circulators said they were being paid $7 per signature.

Roth, the Democratic candidate, sought to raise the issue in his Senate campaign. He criticized his opponent, Miller, for voting against an Assembly measure that sought to ban “bounty hunter” registration drives – that is, ones in which collectors are paid a fee for each registration obtained. The practice has been linked repeatedly to fraud, proponents of the measure said. It failed.

“I urge Assemblyman Miller to join me in calling on those special interest groups involved to immediately stop this inappropriate conduct,” Roth said in a statement.

Miller’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. He told The Press-Enterprise, which first reported on the controversy, that the registrar of voters and district attorney should investigate fraud reports. The surge in Republican registrations in the county reflects the party’s popularity, he said.

In January, before the GOP ramped up its registration drive, Riverside Republicans held a 4.7-percentage-point registration advantage over Democrats.

Nine months later, the county elections office reported that the Republicans’ advantage had increased to about 5.7 percentage points. Republican registrants had increased from about 337,000 to about 372,000. Democrats had increased from nearly 299,000 to almost 321,000.

The controversy is playing out as a new report from the California secretary of state shows a continued decline in Republican registrations statewide.

As the November election approaches, about 30 percent of California’s 17.2 million voters are registered Republicans. That’s a drop of more than 2 percentage points since 2008. Republicans trail the Democrats by 13 points and are almost 9 points ahead of those who choose “no party preference,” according to the report.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in 31 counties, most of them in the Central Valley, the Sierra foothills and other rural areas. Democrats predominate in the coastal cities.

Alameda County is California’s biggest Democratic stronghold, with 56 percent of registered voters. By contrast, Modoc County in the state’s northeastern corner reported 50.4 percent Republican registration. It’s the only county where Republicans are a majority.

San Diego, long a Republican bastion, now is the most evenly divided county in the state, as the GOP edge over Democrats has dwindled to 22 voters. According to the secretary of state, 511,964 voters are registered as Democrats, while 511,986 are Republicans.

(Joel Saget: AFP/GettyImages)

From AP: Here’s something most politicians can “like”: Facebook friends played a big role in getting hundreds of thousands of people to vote in 2010, a new scientific study claims.

Facebook researchers and scientists at the University of California, San Diego conducted a massive online experiment in the mid-term congressional election to test and measure the political power of online peer pressure.

They found that people who got Facebook messages that their friends had voted were a bit more likely to go to the polls than those who didn’t get the same reminder. And from there the effect multiplied in the social network, they reported in Thursday’s journal Nature.

The friend-prodding likely increased voter turnout by as much as 340,000 in the non-presidential election that voted in a new Republican congress, the scientists calculated. They said that it could potentially change the outcome of close elections.

“Our study is the first large-scale scientific test of the idea that online social networks affect real world political behavior,” said study lead author James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego.

He has studied friend and social media influences on public health and politics over the past decade. While pundits have pointed to social media-inspired revolutions in the Arab world, this is more verifiable scientifically because it is a controlled study comparing groups that had different inputs. It’s the voting equivalent of testing real drugs versus sugar pills.

Outside experts say the new study makes sense and fits with other research about how effective get-out-the-vote drives are, but say Fowler’s numbers may be a bit high. That’s because they factor in a large indirect effect, calculations which some didn’t find as convincing.

Nearly every American of voting age who logged into Facebook on Election Day 2010 was part of the experiment, even though they didn’t know it.

Most of them — more than 60 million — saw an announcement on top of their Facebook news feed: Today is Election Day. It showed how many Facebook users as well as their friends had clicked an “I voted” button and showed up to six pictures of those friends. It also linked to a list of polling places.

Researchers compared voter turnout with two groups that didn’t receive that same message. One group of 611,000 people simply got a generic announcement encouraging voting, but no pictures or count of friends. Another 613,000 users didn’t receive any message.

Those who got the peer pressure message were less than half a percent (0.39 percent) more likely to vote than those who got no message or the generic one. While that seems like a very small increase, it is statistically significant and it adds up, Fowler said.

There was no difference in voting found between the generic and no-message groups. Nor was there any difference seen in friend-prompted turnout between self-identified conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans.

Fowler and colleagues didn’t just take the word of people who clicked the “I voted” button. They checked public voting records in 13 states for that election, and found about 4 percent of those who said they voted hadn’t really cast ballots.

Of those who saw the peer pressure posting, Fowler calculated that 60,000 voted who wouldn’t have. On top of that, he said, another 280,000 people voted who wouldn’t have because their friends saw the online message and spread the get-out-the-vote word.

It’s a form of social contagion with people noticing that the original message recipient voted, so the message spread in person, by word of mouth and online, he said.

“The network is key,” he said.

Columbia University political scientist Donald Green said the 60,000 direct voter number makes sense and fits with other research done, which shows that the more personalized the appeal the better the result. But he said he had difficulty buying the calculations used to come up with the 280,000 indirect votes.

George Mason University political science professor Michael McDonald, an expert in voter turnout, said the study seemed reasonable to him, adding “anything we can do to increase turnout is a good thing.”

In the 2010 election, about 38 percent of the voting age population cast ballots, up from about 37 percent in 2006 and 36 percent in 2002. Voting is usually much higher in presidential elections, so the overall effect of a social media get-out-the-vote push might be lower in 2012 because people were already more likely to vote, Fowler and others said.

Fowler and Facebook scientist Cameron Marlow said no decision has been made about doing a similar study or voting drive on Facebook this November.

The study was initiated by Fowler, who got Facebook involved, and was funded by the University of Notre Dame and two private foundations.

Participants in the focus group were vocal about their support for education. (Photo: Stephen Pottage)

With the national conventions behind them now, Republicans and Democrats say they’re all fired up and ready to go — sprinting toward the November election.

Four years ago Barack Obama marched into the White House beside an army of young volunteers. How are voters under 30 feeling about politics now?

As President Obama was giving his acceptance speech Thursday night, a group of younger citizens in Silicon Valley discussed their feelings about the election. Those focus groups are part of KQED’s campaign season series “What’s Government For?” — a joint project with the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California.

While the PPIC does public opinion polling, they also are conducting these smaller conversations to take the pulse of Californians this election year. KQED has already participated in Contra Costa, Fresno and Los Angeles. On Thursday night, 20 young adults — ages 18 to 29 — gathered to talk about their views on government and politics. The group was a mix of Republicans, Democrats, Independents and people who aren’t sure what their political beliefs are or even whether they will vote. KQED’s Political Editor Tyche Hendricks was there for the evening, watching through the two-way mirror. Participants were told only their first names would be used, to ensure candor.

Hendricks said there was a common thread, linking the group. While the 20 people spanned the socio-economic spectrum in terms of jobs and their backgrounds, all of them expressed worry about the state of the country and the economy. “Some blame President Obama, and others just say he was dealt a tough hand and he needs more time to get things right,” Hendricks said.

Some were students, some are working, others are looking for work. Some of them have children of their own. “But just about everybody wanted government to do more to improve schools and to make college more affordable,” Hendricks said, adding a specific point from a focus group participant named Ryan, who said he was the first in his family to go to college and that he’s already spent five years at San Jose State University, just trying to get the courses he needs to graduate. Ryan told the group that tuition has doubled since he’s been there and there are significantly fewer classes.

Proposition 30 on the ballot in November would raise taxes to avoid further cuts in classes and tuition hikes. The focus group was overwhelmingly in favor of Prop. 30 and Prop. 38, which would also raise taxes for education, Hendricks reported.

“Some people said they didn’t favor raising taxes in general,” Hendricks said, “but schools and colleges need the help. A young woman named Divia, who is an immigrant from India, (has) her Masters Degree, and she’s working in the field of food technology. She described herself as politically neutral, but she’s worried about finding a good school for her young daughter. And she thinks that quality education shouldn’t just depend on living in a fancy zip code. In the focus group, Divia said that education ‘should be accessible and available for everyone. … They should not have a choice that only it I have money then I can get an education.’”

This attention to education mirrors what President Obama discussed in his acceptance speech Thursday night. Still, Hendricks says this young group was markedly less excited about President Obama than young people were four years ago.

“Even the Democrats in the group didn’t seem very excited about the election,” Hendricks said. “They were willing to give Obama another chance, but there was a sense of unease that I heard from many of them, and a sense of disconnection from the political process. (One) young woman — a recent college graduate who’s now paying to put her sister through college — said she felt government leaders were ‘cut off’ from the people they represent. She said ‘government, I don’t trust you, but I need you. So, I hope you’re doing good for me.’”

The campaigns have about seven weeks to build trust with voters.

More:

Listen to Scott Shafer’s interview with KQED Political Editor Tyche Hendricks

More stories from the Public Policy Institute of California focus groups:

From Silicon Valley: Eroding Trust in Government Among Young Voters

From the Central Valley: Central Valley Voters Speak Their Minds at Focus Groups

Flickr/Old Man Lee

Two weeks after the June 5 primary, county elections officers are still hard at work counting ballots. There are still more than 300,000 absentee and provisional ballots yet to be processed around California. And lots of races hinge on those votes.

For starters: the fate of Proposition 29, the state tobacco tax hike. Support for the measure still lags, but the gap is narrowing. As of late Tuesday afternoon, the “Yes” votes were 17,571 behind the “No” votes. That’s a tiny fraction of the five million votes cast. And the margin against Prop. 29 has been shrinking steadily.  On June 12, it was 28,000, down from 63,000 votes the day after the election. And 337,977 ballots are still to be counted.

In addition, five congressional races and ten state assembly races are too close to call… with margins of less than two percent between the second and third vote-getters (only the top two will advance to the Nov. 6 general election).

In Congressional District 2, which stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, Democrat Norman Solomon trails Republican Daniel Roberts by 1,241 votes. The winner will face off against Democrat Jared Huffman in November.

In Congressional District 8, in the sparsely populated region east of the Sierras, three Republicans and one Democrat are all within about 900 votes of each other. The candidate currently in third place is just 215 votes shy of second place.

In Congressional District 21 which runs from south of Fresno down to Bakersfield, Democrat Blong Xiong trails Democrat John Hernandez by 492 votes. The winner will face Republican David Valadao.

In Congressional District 38, in Los Angeles County, Republican Jorge Robles is 632 votes behind Republican Benjamin Campos in a fight to take on Democratic incumbent Linda Sanchez.

And in Congressional District 52, in San Diego County, Democrat Lori Saldana is just 713 votes behind Democrat Scott Peters in a race to take on incumbent Republican Brian Bilbray.

In all those races, there are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballots still being tallied.

The moral of the story? Your vote COUNTS!

Two thirds of California’s registered voters didn’t make it to the polls on June 5. But just a few hundred more votes in any of these close races could have swung the outcome. By voting — or staying home — you’ve had an impact on the election.