If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then California has paid Ohio a major compliment.
In mid-May, the Buckeye State unveiled a lottery meant to encourage more Ohioans to get COVID vaccinations. The incentive: every Wednesday through June 23, the state randomly plucks two people from its database of vaccine recipients. One of the selectees, from a group of 12-to-17-year-olds, gets four years of free tuition at an Ohio state college or university. The other winner, from a pool of qualified adults, gets $1 million.
The lottery earned scads of positive media attention, which seemingly didn’t go unnoticed by the powers-that-be in Sacramento. Late last week, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a “Vax for the Win” incentive plan for boosting COVID vaccinations—in true Golden State fashion, a giveaway that throws a lot of dollars at a problem. And one that, in true Newsom fashion, seems awfully opportunistic.
Here’s how California’s nine-digit-dollar scheme works:
- All Californians age 13 and up and at least partially vaccinated are eligible for so-called $50,000 Friday cash drawings this coming and next Friday (30 winners dividing a $1.5 million pie).
- On June 15 (perhaps not coincidentally, the same day businesses fully reopen in the Golden State), 10 Californians will be awarded $1.5 million apiece (they have to be fully vaccinated to earn the cash).
- Beginning last week, the next two million Californians to begin and complete their vaccinations will automatically be eligible for $50 prepaid grocery/gift cards—those prizes accounting for $100 million of the $116.5 in total winnings.
So what could go wrong with the idea of Newsom playing the part of the McDonald’s Monopoly man?
Ironically, given that we’re talking about California, aka America’s cradle of technological advancements: shaky tech support. Or so we’ve learned in over a year of watching Sacramento’s bureaucracy stumble and bumble its way through various aspects of pandemic response. That would include California’s “My Turn” website, created to streamline processing vaccine inquiries and appointments, whose inflexible design makes it difficult for counties to set aside vaccine appointments for targeted populations (the quick construction of the portal has led to all sorts of headaches, including its users’ spending hours on line in hopes of finding a vaccination appointment).
Another California government tech problem child: the state’s Employment Development Department, whose backlog of unemployment claims past 21 days pending department action has doubled from a little over 111,300 such claims in the second week of April to just over 225,500 claims in May’s final week (as such, a population of unemployed and disgruntled Californians slightly larger than the population of San Bernardino—California’s 17th largest city).
At the risk of sounding like a Debbie Downer, one might predict how Newsom’s giveaway bonanza could go off the rails should such technological glitches resurface. That includes the state’s ability to work the phone lines. According to “Vax for the Win” guidelines, winning Californians who qualify for a $50 grocery run “will receive a text message with an electronic prepaid card redemption code sent to their mobile phone or email address 7–10 days after their two-dose series of Pfizer or Moderna, or single dose of Johnson and Johnson.”
It adds: “Those who do not have a mobile phone or email address can receive a physical card by calling 1-833-993-3873, 7–10 days after receiving their final dose.”
Once again, we’ll see if California can process its COVID-related data in an orderly fashion. And, for that matter, we’ll see if the aforementioned 833-prefix number echoes EDD and its overwhelmed call centers.
There’s one other way to look at the great California giveaway: what it says about the governor and his priorities.
Consider, for example, how New Jersey is trying to draw in vaccine skeptics. That state’s governor, Phil Murphy, has rolled out a series of incentives meant to get reluctant New Jerseyites a date with the needle. That includes a “State Parks Vax Pass” to all residents who get a shot by the Fourth of July.
Newsom, though governing a state with arguably the most diverse and spectacular park system in America (280 state park units, over 340 miles of coastline, nearly 1,000 miles of lake and river frontage) didn’t go down that road—say, handing out free park passes.
Nor did a California governor who claims to be a champion of education journey into the realm of college scholarships.
In New York, that state’s governor (the embattled Andrew Cuomo) has unveiled a six-week program giving teens and pre-teens a shot at winning free four-year scholarships to any CUNY or SUNY college in the Empire State (50 “Excelsior Scholarships” will be handed out by July 7).
Why did Newsom take a pass on handing out free college educations? The guess here: politics.
In Ohio and New York, the total number of college scholarship winners amounts to but a busload of students. Newsom, on the other hand, has come up with a system that potentially rewards hundreds of thousands of would-be voters—Californians cashing in on their winnings as Newsom faces a recall challenge (perhaps as soon as August or September, as positive polling has California Democrats now wanting to fast-track the special election).
Yet another way to look at the $116.5 million vaccine lottery: it could have been worse—much worse, like hand-to-the-forehead California cringeworthy.
Newsom, a product of the San Francisco Bay Area’s blue bubble—and, to his critics, the embodiment of Marin County woke self-entitlement—didn’t subject voters to goat yoga, organic juice, the latest from Oprah’s Book Club or, for that matter, the same recreational cannabis that he helped to legalize via the initiative process.
When it came to dreaming up $50 grocery cards, Whole Foods didn’t end up as the lone destination (granted, $50 doesn’t get one very far in that food chain—a testament to both upscale pricing and these inflationary times).
Nor will vaccinated Californians receive a copy of Newsom’s book Citizenville—his guide to reinventing government in the Digital Age.
Released in paperback seven years ago, Newsom’s tech-jargon treatise is much easier to mock (as Stephen Colbert ably does here) than it is to decipher and process.
Come to think of it, the governor’s book is the one thing missing from the governor’s plan: a form of punishment—a stick, not a carrot—for those who refuse to getting vaccinated.
