A Thousand Voices: Readers differ on satisfaction with elected officials

It’s statistically too close to call any consensus on how LJworld.com readers are feeling about the current Lawrence City Commission or the Lawrence school board.

The Journal-World’s latest survey of approximately 1,000 online readers shows there are varying levels of satisfaction with those governing bodies, as well as with the County Commission. Many respondents expressed neutrality, answering that they were “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” with the local elected officials.

About this article

A Thousand Voices is a feature that surveys readers of LJWorld.com about their opinions on a variety of issues being debated by the public. The Journal-World will regularly conduct a poll that captures a representative sample of the approximately 35,000 users of LJWorld.com. All polling will be conducted by our partner, Google Consumer Surveys. The Google system chooses participants for the poll at random. Users of LJWorld.com have no ability to choose to take the poll. Some people had this survey presented to them when they went to our website and some didn’t. Each poll consists of at least 1,000 responses from website users. The survey software calculates results using margins of error and 95 percent confidence levels common to the polling industry.

If you have a topic you would like to see as part of a future poll, please suggest it to Nikki Wentling at nwentling@ljworld.com

Take a look at the results.

City Commission:

When asked how satisfied they were with the five-member City Commission, “somewhat satisfied,” with 24.5 percent, received more votes than any other option.

Next, with 23 percent, was “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.” “Somewhat dissatisfied” gleaned 16.4 percent of votes, and “very dissatisfied” had 7.8 percent. The least-chosen answer was “very satisfied,” with 5 percent.

The remaining respondents chose “no opinion” (14.8 percent) or “I don’t know” (8.5 percent).

The margin of error for these results was 1.6 to 2.7 percentage points.

Douglas County Commission:

When answering the same question, this time about the Douglas County Commission, “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” was the most-selected option, with 23.4 percent. “Somewhat satisfied” had 19.6 percent.

“No opinion” was the third-most-selected option with 18.5 percent, followed by “I don’t know” (13.2 percent) and “somewhat dissatisfied” (12 percent).

“Very satisfied” was selected by 7.9 percent of respondents, and the least-answered option was “very dissatisfied” with 5.4 percent.

The results had a margin of error of 1.5 to 2.7 percentage points.

Lawrence school board:

For the Lawrence school board, “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” had the highest number of votes (23.2 percent), narrowly beating “somewhat satisfied,” which had 22.3 percent.

From there, the answers continued in the same order as they did when respondents were asked about Douglas County commissioners, though the percentages are slightly different.

“No opinion” had 19.6 percent of the votes, and “I don’t know” had 12 percent. “Somewhat dissatisfied” was next, with 10.3 percent, and “very satisfied” followed with 6.7 percent.

The answer least chosen was “very dissatisfied,” with 5.9 percent.

The margin of error was 1.3 to 2.7 percentage points.

The only winner out of the three questions that was statistically significant was the satisfaction level regarding the Douglas County Commission. According to information from Google Consumer Surveys, the answer “neither satisfied or dissatisfied” had a 95 percent confidence level, meaning that if the survey were conducted 100 times, it would come out as the top-selected choice 95 times.

We first asked whether those responding to the survey were registered voters in Lawrence. Only those who selected “yes” were allowed to answer the remaining questions.

The city’s 2015 citizen survey, which was conducted by Olathe-based market research firm ETC Institute, included overall satisfaction of randomly selected Lawrence residents about city services but did not ask specifically about the City Commission.

The results of an employee survey conducted this year stated 62 percent of 567 employees who answered disagreed that the City Commission understood the working conditions in their departments.

Asking readers about their satisfaction level with their governing officials is something we’d like to do regularly. This is the first instance we’ve posed the question.