Category: ballot access

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ballot access education and schooling folly ideological culture media and media people Popular responsibility

Fiddling with the Franchise

voting age, democracy, elections, adult, maturity

In 2013, Tacoma Park, Maryland, became the first place in the U.S. to allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections.* Now, Washington, D.C., Councilman Charles Allen, “inspired by the high-schoolers who are campaigning for gun control and filled D.C. streets last month in a massive protest that mesmerized the country,” reports the Washington Post, wants to follow suit.

“It’s pretty hard for anyone to watch the events of the last couple of months,” claims Councilman Allen, “and not understand the pure power and maturity of incredibly young voices.”

Well, they do use adult words.

One has to wonder: would the “maturity” of these young adults equally amaze this politician, were they advocating opinions** with which he disagreed?

But wait a second . . . wasn’t one of the demands of the “March for Our Lives” to raise, not lower, the age when a person would be deemed mature enough to legally purchase a scary-looking rifle?

Lowering the voting age seems odd, at best, with society lurching in the other direction — raising the age of adulthood for everything else. Decades ago, the legal age to purchase alcohol was 18 in some places; today it is 21 everywhere. In Virginia, one may still drive at 16, as I could back in the day . . . but now there are limits on other young people riding in the car unless the driver is 18.

More ominously, facilitation by many public schools of the recent student walkouts and marches present the strongest argument against lowering the voting age: So long as government schools act in a partisan manner, indoctrination and intimidation would be rampant.

Who wants a captive audience of would-be voters most?

Unscrupulous ideologues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Greenbelt and Hyattsville, Maryland, as well as Berkeley, California, have since joined Tacoma Park in allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections.

** Term limits, say. Or school vouchers. Or the rights of gestating humans.

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Accountability ballot access folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies Regulating Protest

The Real Democracy Hack

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, data mining, hack, hacking, elections, democracy, meddling

A whistleblower in a British data company called Cambridge Analytica accuses his company of stealing as many as 50 million Facebook profiles. This is the latest version of the “hacked the election” meme pushed by the establishment after Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Cambridge received data on 270,000 Facebook users, who traded their personal Facebook data and their friends’ profiles to download and use an app. The 50 million figure is an extrapolation supposing the average user had 200 friends.

The outrage over this “hack” — by the whistleblower and by the television news commentators, who seem collectively to suffer from a case of the vapors — appears to be mostly pretense. That is, they pretend voters voted in a way they did not want to vote.

But that simply wasn’t the case. The implication that conspiratorial, behind-the-scenes puppeteers changed votes in some nefarious scam remains far off the mark. All we are really talking about is data miners gaining additional info that they pushed to political propagandists who in turn did what campaign propagandists always do.

Maybe we should be grateful. 

And saying this data group propelled Trump is like saying that support for term limits propelled the GOP to take over Congress in 1994 — though, in this analogy, the data firm deserves less credit than the term limits issue. 

This is more a “life hack” than a technological intrusion into the political process. “Democracy was hacked” like civilization was hacked by Johannes Gutenberg.

What the fainting couch crowd really regrets? Their inability to control new media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders political challengers Regulating Protest too much government

New-Fangled Vote Counting

Florida, Proposal 97, Constitution, democracy, voting, initiative, Constitution Revision Commission

Call me old-fashioned, but when you go to the pols to cast your vote on a ballot measure, your Yes vote should count for yes and your No vote for no.

And if you choose not to vote, your non-vote should count for neither yes nor no.

That’s just common sense. Right?

Well, meet its antithesis: Proposal 97, now being considered by Florida’s powerful Constitution Revision Commission (CRC).* Proposal 97 would count all those who do not cast a vote for or against a ballot measure as a No vote against it.

To pass a constitutional amendment in the Sunshine State already requires a supermajority vote of at least 60 percent of those who do cast a vote on the measure. Under Proposal 97, counting all those not voting on it as No votes, that percentage would necessarily go even higher. If 10 percent don’t vote, Yes would have to come in at 67 percent to win.

This is minority rule . . . with an extra perverse twist.

The supermajority requirement encourages big money interests to spend heavily against ballot initiatives — even when the issues have clear majority support — because if they can manage to lose by less than 20 points (60–40 percent), they win. Now all opponents need do is poison the water with the nastiest campaigning imaginable, causing more voters to throw up their hands or pinch their noses and avoid the issue . . .

. . . thus, being counted as voting No.

Don’t abstain. Stop Proposal 97. Tell them NO here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* How powerful is the CRC? Every 20 years it meets with the awesome authority to refer constitutional amendments directly to the ballot — as many as it wishes and the amendments can be packaged to include several different subjects. No other state has a similar body. Of the 37 commission members, the governor appoints 15, the Senate president and the House speaker each appoint nine, the chief justice of the state supreme court appoints three and the attorney general is an automatic member.

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Accountability ballot access general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders moral hazard

Fear of Voters

Oklahoma, votes, democracy, initiative, marijuana, State Rep. John Enns, ballot

You are a state legislator, say. And an issue could be placed on the ballot on which a majority of your state’s citizens might not vote according to your preference. What would you do?

  1. Educate your fellow citizens on the merits of your position; or
  2. Dawdle while calling a lobbyist for advice; or
  3. Change the constitution to make it impossible for such a vote to ever be held?

State Rep. John Enns chose option C — perhaps after exhausting B. Stamping out Oklahoma’s ballot initiative process, freeing Enns and other legislators from this citizen check at the ballot box, is the essence of his House Bill 1603.

The Sooner State already possessed the toughest petition requirements in the country.  Supporters must gain the country’s highest percentage of voter support (15 percent) while limited to the second shortest time period (90 days) to circulate petitions.

On top of this current statewide slog, Enns’ constitutional amendment would require also qualifying in every single county. Oklahoma has 77 counties.

As the Tulsa World editorialized, “he wants to make it impossible.”

What lousy rationale lies behind Enns’ desire to destroy democratic governance?

In response to another legislator’s query about his “fear that some marijuana bill will . . . become a state [ballot] question,” Enns claimed his effort was “not pre-emptive.” But he acknowledged his strong opposition to legalizing recreational marijuana, which he pointed out “had been done through initiative petition” in other states.

Enns is afraid of Oklahoma voters having their say. He should be.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* I mean, of course, that Rep. Enns should fear being booted out of office on his keister. He should not have to fear physical reprisal. The Tulsa World reports that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol is now providing security to Enns, after a death threat was received related to his HB 1603.

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Accountability ballot access general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders national politics & policies political challengers responsibility tax policy term limits too much government

What Unlimited Government Costs Us

Tim Eyman, doll, petition, taxes, Washington, initiative, democracy, voters

“Olympia can’t restrain itself,” Tim Eyman wrote the other day, a judgment on legislative irresponsibility hardly unique to the Evergreen State. Citizens around the country have cause to lament the difficulty of obtaining anything close to a good legislature.

Too often the merely “bad” would constitute a significant improvement.

Which is why legislators need to be put on a short leash. Limits on government must be written into law, where possible into either the U.S. Constitution or state constitutions, so the limits cannot be tampered with by legislators, good or bad.

Washington State initiative guru Tim Eyman, cited above, has made a career of working for just those kinds of limits. In 2007, Eyman and the citizen group Voters Want More Choices petitioned onto the statewide ballot a requirement that any tax increase must receive a two-thirds vote from both legislative chambers.

Voters passed the measure* in 2007, 2011 and 2012.

In an email to supporters this month, Eyman presents data — an “amazing real-world comparison” — to help us understand how effective the limits were . . . while they lasted.

He notes that “with the 2/3 rule in effect from 2008-2012, those 5 legislative sessions cost the taxpayers $6.894 billion” in increased taxes.

And he compares that to the five years (2013-2017) since the state’s highest court struck down the voters’ two-thirds mandate: “WITHOUT the 2/3 rule, those 5 legislative sessions cost the taxpayers $23.679 billion.”

“Without the fiscal discipline imposed by citizen initiatives,” Eyman concludes, “politicians cannot hold back.”

Now we have hard evidence for what unlimited government costs us: more than three times more!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Washington State’s ballot initiative process allows voters to pass simple statutes but not constitutional amendments. For two years after passage, legislators must garner a two-thirds vote to override a ballot initiative. After those two years, only a simple majority is required.

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Accountability ballot access general freedom government transparency ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption local leaders national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Great Faction

great fiction, government, citizen, initiative, term limits, Paul Jacob

Politics isn’t a pretty business.

Frédéric Bastiat called the beast it serves “that great fiction” not because it doesn’t exist — intrusive state power sure persists — but rather because what it promises cannot really happen: “everyone living at the expense of everyone else.”

What can we do? How do we counteract a game that is rigged to increase the insanity, not reduce it?

Last week I indicated one thing a minor party with that goal in mind could do: use its power of spoiling elections to change major party behavior, and thus give citizens a fighting chance to restrain governmental metastasis.

Cancer.

I also suggested “blackmailing” the major parties into setting up a system of voting that . . . ends the power to blackmail! I believe that system — ranked choice voting — holds many positives, not the least of which is ending strategic voting, wherein voters are tempted to “falsify” their own preferences and support candidates they might dislike. This is as corrupting to the citizenry as the Great Fiction itself.

Let’s hope a savvy minor party leverages the major parties, gaining reforms to improve the system. Regardless, we can all — independently — push two other limits on political power:

  1. term limits at all levels, and
  2. initiative and referendum rights in all the states, not just the 26 that have it now.

Initiative and referendum rights would give ordinary citizens the leverage to possibly restrain the mad rush to live at each others’ expense. With the initiative, citizens can gain term limits, which produce more competitive legislative elections and lead to fewer legislators captured by the interests loitering in the capitol.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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