Letter to the Editor:
The Thirty-Mile Toll on Democracy
To run for the Burbank Board of Education, you don’t need money. You don’t need signatures. You need something harder to come by: a free weekday between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM and the ability to drive thirty miles to Norwalk.
That’s the rule. Every candidate for a Burbank school board seat must file in person at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder in Norwalk — sixty miles roundtrip, up to three hours lost in traffic — before the August 7 deadline.
Think about who that rule filters out. The single parent who can’t take a half day off work. The teacher who’s in a classroom until 3:00. The small business owner who can’t close the shop. The retiree who no longer drives the 5 and the 605. These are exactly the people who should be running for a board that decides how their neighbors’ property taxes are spent — and the filing process quietly tells them not to bother.
The people it doesn’t filter out? Insiders. Incumbents. Candidates backed by organizations with staff and flexible schedules. A barrier that costs nothing on paper tilts the field toward the connected.
There’s an obvious fix, and we asked for it. The Burbank Republican Party requested that the Registrar-Recorder send a representative to Burbank — even for a single day — so local candidates could complete their filings here, in the city they seek to serve. The county sends mobile teams for voter registration and outreach all the time. Candidate filing should be no different.
We have received no reply.
A county of ten million people, with a registrar’s budget in the tens of millions, cannot claim it lacks the resources to bring one clerk and a stack of Declaration of Candidacy forms to a city of one hundred thousand. This is a choice, and it’s the wrong one.
Ballot access shouldn’t depend on your commute. Until the county fixes this, the message to ordinary Burbank residents is simple: democracy is open — if you can get to Norwalk before 5:00.
We can do better. Norwalk, call us back.
Helen Wong
Public Information Officer
The Burbank Republican Party
