2026 CANDIDATE SURVEY
Aida Ashouri
Candidate for Los Angeles City Attorney
To help foster greater discussion about reforming City Hall, we asked City of LA candidates to participate in a six question survey. Half of the questions seek general feedback, and the rest are issue specific.
Please note survey responses, candidate information, and website links are provided for informational/educational purposes only. Fair Rep LA is presenting these responses as submitted without edit, evaluation, or commentary. Fair Rep LA does not endorse, support, or oppose candidates or their responses in any way.
Survey Info:
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Answers: Respondents were told that questions could be answered in 1-2 sentences, and that while additional context was welcome, the form had a 1,250 character limit for each question (approximately 200 words).
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Resource Document: Additional background information was provided via a resource document.
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Participation: Surveys were sent to all City of LA candidates qualified to appear on the ballot. This is a very busy time for candidates, so we appreciate everyone who made time to respond. Please avoid reading too much into a candidate’s lack of participation. We respect the limited bandwidth campaigns have, and it's possible that our request(s) may have been lost in their inbox.
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Background: The City of Los Angeles is undergoing the first comprehensive review of our city’s governance structure in 27 years. The Charter Reform Commission recently transmitted a report containing over 60 recommendations to the City Council, who will soon be deciding what will be sent to the November ballot for potential approval by voters.
I support many recommendations, but the ones that stand out to me as the most transformative are expanding City Council, approving ranked choice voting including proportional representation, and expanding ballot access.
I strongly oppose, and have voiced this through public comment, taking away the public's right to vote for City Attorney, splitting up the office of the City Attorney, and making the office a mayoral appointed position, and making it easier to sell public park land. The former will reduce the office's ability to work independent from influence from the Mayor and City Council, create inefficiencies and expense, and more risk of conflict of interest. The latter will result in increased risk of corruption in a City with a history of bribery through real estate deals and a loss in public land on the heels of a $4 million Park Assessment Survey that resulted in a recommendation that we need more park land.
The Charter Reform process is an opportunity to make our city more inclusive, egalitarian, and accessible. The recommendations of this commission are not as robust as I would have liked to see. I would have liked to see more changes rules on how housing is built to make it easier to build multifamily housing, changes in hiring to reduce nepotism and increase diverse hires, inclusion of environmental considerations in all city decisions in the face of climate change, and others to allow our city to meet a critical moment of crises.
I support expanding City Council. I think 25 is a low number of districts, especially if they are single member. This recommendation would be more effective if it was 25 districts with some districts being multi-member to increase representation. 25 single-member districts means we are still far away from our counterparts in NYC and Chicago who have double the representation that we do.
Ranked choice voting is a great system that allows for people who do not have the financial resources or the institutional connections to obtain a seat at the table. We need ranked choice voting to help us break from the dominance of a two-party system that has stood in the way of the expansion of healthcare for all, holding polluters accountable, and expanding public transit.
I support expanding ballot access for youth and for non-citizens in all elections.