VOTE
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| Hammer Museum at UCLA |
The Hammer Museum and the Skirball Cultural Center are polling places this election day. This is part of a nationwide trend, with such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History participating. Swing state voters can cast ballots at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), the University of Michigan Art Museum, and the Phoenix Art Museum.
Schools and churches are more often used as polling places. The venue may not be neutral, suggested a 2008 Stanford study. Researchers found that volunteers were more likely to vote for a school funding initiative when cued with pictures of schools; to reject a stem cell initiative when cued with images of churches. Now known as the polling place priming effect, it led to a 2011 legal analysis asking "Is voting in churches (or anywhere else) unconstitutional?"
Accept the polling place priming effect, and museum voting ought to be favorable to candidates and initiatives supporting arts, environmental, and scientific funding. The Hammer's emphasis on social justice and the Skirball's on Jewish causes have obvious political dimensions as well.
Stanford marketing professor S. Christian Wheeler said: "The influence of polling location on voting found in our research would be more than enough to change the outcome of a close election."
Comments
When the ballot measure back in the early 2000s to give hundreds of millions of dollars to LACMA for the first proposal to tear it down and replace it with a Rem-Koolhaus plastic bubble wasn't passed by enough voters, I was relieved.
In the meantime, LA taxpayers reportedly give more money each year to subsidize LACMA than NYC's taxpayers do for the Metropolitan. I don't mind that and think it's a good thing for local government too. But with government-authorized/taxpayer dollars comes a greater responsibility for someone like Michael Govan, etc, to be honest, ethical and transparent.