Your Ballot Is Not Lost. It's Buried.

Here is a number to chew on with your coffee: 7 percent. In Ladera Ranch's last community board election, LARCS in June 2025, 506 ballots were counted out of 7,237 members.

Seven percent. Your kid's soccer team gets better attendance at a 7 a.m. Saturday game in the rain.

Let me be fair: you are not lazy. You are busy. You are the sandwich generation, squeezed between school pickup and aging parents, and the voting process quietly assumes you have a free afternoon and a treasure map. Unless you've opted in to email, you must still check a physical mailbox. You must spot the right envelope among the catalogs. You must hold that paper, then find the online link, then log in, then understand a delegate system most homeowners have never heard of. Each step loses a few more people. By the finish line, 93 percent of us have wandered off.

I can't prove anyone designed it that way. I don't need to. Friction behaves the same whether it was engineered or inherited. Anyone who has done time at the DMV knows the feeling. Systems built on paper and process drift toward the status quo, because the status quo is comfortable and a quiet electorate asks very few questions.

So here is a question, and you are allowed to ask it out loud: When was the last time our largest vendor contracts, community management and landscaping, were competitively bid? In nearly every business on earth, the answer is "regularly." Ask your candidates. Ask for the dates. If the honest answer is "about 20 years ago," then you have learned something worth a stamp.

This is why I built the Ladera Bubble: so residents and board can see each other, and so money follows what the majority actually wants. But transparency without participation is a lighthouse in an empty harbor. The ballot is where the light has to land.

And this is a solved problem. Ladera already votes online. The gap is the front door. Other California communities send ballot reminders by text and email and make electronic notice the easy default. None of it removes anyone's right to a paper notice. It simply stops making a paper mailer the main door.

What you can do this week:

• Find your ballot. Voting is open now and closes Friday, October 30, at 5 p.m. Look for an email from LARMAC@tieivote.com or a mailer with your login, then vote at tieivote.com. Stuck? Call The Inspectors of Election at 888-211-5332.
• Opt in to email notices. I've drafted a two-minute email to the board giving written consent; it's below.
• Ask your candidates two questions: Will you support email-first notices and text reminders? Will you put major contracts out for bid?
• Tell one neighbor. Turnout rises one text at a time.

Seven percent is not a verdict on Ladera Ranch. It is a signal that the door is too small. Before October 30 at 5 p.m., let's kick it open.