Yard signs clutter up the view, add zilch to the debate

Signs, signs, everywhere signs.

If you have any doubt that election season is in full swing, all you have to do is drive down Main Street in Cambria (or up Burton Drive, or past any number of local residences), and those doubts will vanish in a sea of colorful cardboard.

It’s a sea not nearly as pretty as the blue Pacific a few blocks or even footsteps away. And, it turns out, it’s probably not even worth it.

Do these signs really benefit the candidates, or do they do more to provide a sense of engagement and kinship to their supporters, who probably think they’re making a difference by waving the (cardboard) flag in support of their chosen political champion?

It turns out that, except in all but the closest of races, these signs have a negligible impact. The only kind of difference they’re making is cluttering up the sidewalk or the forest or their neighborhood.

A study late last year found that a candidate got a 1.7 percent boost from yard signs.

How would this translate to Cambria?

In the most recent election year, 2014, a total of 2,364 voters cast ballots for candidates to serve on the Cambria Community Services District board. Multiply that by 0.017, and you get a hair over 40 votes. That’s right, for all those eyesores springing up like weeds beneath our beautiful pines and among the town’s annual array of scarecrows, the net result is just 40 votes — for all the candidates combined.

There were four candidates on the ballot in 2014, so chances are they would have received somewhere between seven and 13 votes each, based on how their votes were distributed. But even if the top also-ran had received all 40 of those votes, he still would have lost by 340.

Is it really worth it?

Although some candidates provide signs (along with bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc.) in exchange for donations that more than cover their costs, it’s not as though the placards are free. One site, Signs on the Cheap, offers “100 signs for just $99.” Dirt Cheap Signs offers 100 two-sided signs for $235. Or you can spend more ($8.99) for a single sign from Staples.

And do these things really contribute anything of value to the electoral process? Campaign signs typically include zero information about a candidate’s record, character or stance on the issues beyond, perhaps, a generalized campaign slogan.

You think 30-second TV sound bites are bad? They’re a veritable encyclopedia of information compared to yard signs.

I can only think of one valuable piece of information that’s conveyed by a yard sign: It shows that a candidate is invested enough in the campaign to put his or her name out there. Otherwise, it’s all about two things: name recognition and peer pressure. I can’t think of two worse reasons to vote for a candidate than, “Oh, I recognize that name,” and, “Everybody else is doing it.”

But in the end, most candidates don’t care why people vote for them (apart from having to repudiate support from, say, a KKK member or Islamic State leader) — only that they do.

Putting up a yard sign makes you part of a team, as surely as slapping a bumper sticker on your car might signal your allegiance to the San Francisco 49ers. It doesn’t say anything about whether the 49ers are any good this year; merely that you happen to like them. And it’s not going to make anyone else buy a ticket to a 49ers game.

These things are protected by the First Amendment, so long as they don’t violate county and state regulations:

▪  They can’t be bigger than 32 square feet.

▪  They can’t appear sooner than 90 days before an election — or be left up more than 10 days afterward.

▪  You can’t put them up in a highway right-of-way, and they can’t be visible within 660 feet of a landscaped freeway.

Within these parameters, you can post those placards to your heart’s content. They’ll cost you some money, they’ll make a beautiful town a little uglier, they won’t add anything of value to the debate and they almost certainly won’t affect the outcome. But go right ahead. Nobody ever said politics had to make sense.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 9:39 AM with the headline "Yard signs clutter up the view, add zilch to the debate."