Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

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Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

Gold Medal Worthy

Yes On 1

The 2024 Summer Olympics will not be held in Boston.

Beantown abandoned its bid to host the games after Mayor Marty Walsh refused to sign a contract that would have left the city responsible for billions in possible cost overruns.

Did I say possible?

Call it seemingly inevitable.

“I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” declared Walsh.

People throughout the Bay State can now rest easy — no tax hike or debt burden to build expensive infrastructure . . . and produce bigger traffic jams. Of course, polls had long shown voters opposed to the idea. But that doesn’t matter to career politicians. Nor to the mayor — until recently.

Mayor Walsh’s deep concern for taxpayers notwithstanding, citizen activism made the difference. A month ago, the Yes on 1 committee joined together with Evan Falchuk, chairman of Citizens for a Say, in supporting a ballot measure to prohibit spending any tax dollars on the Olympics.

Last year, I worked with Yes on 1 — led by Steve Aylward, Rep. Geoff Diehl, Marty Lamb and Rep. Shaunna O’Connell — to pass Question 1, ending automatic gas tax increases in Massachusetts. Olympic officials had been assured a ballot measure was unlikely to get in the way; then came the Yes on 1 folks with the know-how to petition just such a measure onto the ballot.

Walsh claimed this opposition had nothing to do with his decision, calling them “about ten people on Twitter and a couple people out there who are constantly feeding the drumbeat.”

Dancing to a different drummer, Mr. Mayor.

Bostonians can thank the state’s ballot initiative process, which provides a way for the people to be heard. And, of course, citizen leaders who take the initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Yes On 1

 

Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall

Temporal Redistricting

Sneaky Democracy

They must be proud of themselves, the Little Rock insiders who pushed through a vote on a bond measure in hot-as-Hades mid-July.

Less than 4 percent of eligible voters turned out for the off-cycle exercise in 100-degree democracy. The measure, which refinances previous library bonds and puts an influx of cash into Little Rock public library branches, passed with over four-fifths of the minuscule turnout.

Now, as bond measures go, this one sure seems like a dream; its advocates say it will reduce, not increase, taxes.

But that July 14 vote!

“There was no organized opposition to the bond refinancing campaign,” we read, courtesy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Still, Pulaski County Election Commission Executive Director Bryan Poe expected a higher voter turnout.” He thought they would get at least 6,000 voters. Still, even that many votes would have amounted to less than 5 percent of the over 126,000 registered city voters.

It certainly wasn’t any surprise, then, that turnout would be tiny and democratic decision-making left to a tiny fraction of the public.

Detect a certain odor?

It stinks of redistricting. When politicians redistrict voters so that predictable partisan outcomes can be reached — somehow to the benefit of those doing the redistricting — the insiders are not really trying to provide representation to voters. They are trying to continue their business as usual.

“Insiders know best”?

By selecting a summer date for the vote, insiders in effect redistrict the voters using time as the gerrymandering boundary. Call it temporal redistricting, advantaging those with the most at stake in the vote’s outcome.

Call it democracy for the 1 (or 3½) percent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Sneaky Democracy

 

Categories
crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall

No Part Justice

Dr. Bosworth

Dr. Annette Bosworth was convicted last week on twelve felony counts. She now faces as many as 24 years in prison, $48,000 in fines . . . and the likely loss of her medical license.

Her crime? She circulated six nominating petitions to get on the South Dakota ballot in 2014. Thirty-seven people signed — at her medical office and at a Hutterite colony (where she sees patients) — while she was on a medical mission to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.

Dr. Bosworth’s sister was one.

But the affidavit on the petition reads that the circulator must actually witness each person’s signature being affixed. Bosworth should not have signed it.

Hence six counts of perjury and six more, one for each false document filed.

In court, Bosworth testified that her attorney — who legally notarized the petitions — told her she met the legal definition of a circulator.

Last month, I traveled to South Dakota to release a Citizens in Charge Foundation report on this prosecution. One key finding? While the threatened penalty is the most severe any American has ever faced in a petition-related case, Dr. Bosworth submitted signatures of people she knew and who very much did support her. No forgery, no fraud . . . against the voters.

In response, the state’s largest newspaper reported that, “[Attorney General Marty] Jackley said that it’s ‘well understood in state law’ that the offenses Bosworth faces are punishable by probation and not jail time.” Then after her conviction, Jackley suggested a presumption for “either no or limited actual jail time,” adding, “but that presumption can be overcome by a defendant’s conduct.”

Annette Bosworth should be held accountable. But aiming to ruin her life isn’t any part of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Dr. Bosworth

 

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Anti-Democratic Republicans?

political, politics, 2 Party Lockout, political party, politics, exclusion, elections, democracy, collage, photomontage

The Republican Party of Ohio paid lawyers $300,000 to keep a competitor off the ballot.

Typical two-party corruption. We can blame the party, yes — but also blame the system.

A “two-party system” is, mathematicians tell us, the logical result of simple plurality/winner-takes-all elections. That is, when the first candidate “past the post” wins enough votes to best any other, that candidate wins.

When you count votes like this, two parties emerge to dominate.

But to really rule the roost, those parties are incentivized to pile on . . . to make it hard for “minor-party” challengers. Ballot access becomes a nasty business.

Last year Charlie Earl ran for the governorship of Ohio as a Libertarian Party candidate. But he was blocked from the ballot. And when the Ohio LP “filed a federal lawsuit to try to force Earl’s name on the ballot,” Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges testified that his party had nothing to do with the legal maneuvers involved.

As Borges put it at the time, “Anyone who’s looking for the conspiracy behind it — it’s just not there.”

Now, it turns out, the conspiracy was there. His party paid the bills.

Whether Borges was lying or not — maybe he was clueless about these shenanigans — the deed got done.

More important than whether Borges himself can be held culpable for the ballot-access conspiracy, it’s the system that encourages such anti-democratic nonsense that needs changing. First-past-the-post elections must go. There are alternatives, as my friends at FairVote.org champion.

As Ohio GOP leaders stand shame-faced with the evidence of evildoing, it’s time to press such reforms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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2 Party Lockout

 

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Finished Business

Nebraska Win

The civil war is over!

I mean Nebraska’s civil war, a 23-year schism between its unicameral legislature and what’s known as the state’s “second house” — that is, the people, acting through the initiative and referendum process, often checking the power of the first house.

Hero of the day? State Senator Mike Groene of North Platte, who championed Legislative Bill 367. Kudos also to the 42-0 vote of the Nebraska Legislature that enacted the measure, as well as to Governor Pete Ricketts for signing it into law.

Groene, who has been politically active for years with the Western Nebraska Taxpayers Association, got into office as a result of term limits. His LB 367 reverses the state’s seven-year ban on paying petition circulators according to the number of signatures they gather. He convincingly argued that the ban had “really broken the back of people trying to take part in their government through the petition process.”

“It’s time for this body to call a truce,” Groene told fellow lawmakers, declaring that since term limits were first passed, citizens and their representatives had been locked in a “civil war.”

During that war, State Sen. Diane Schimek, a 20-year legislator about to be term-limited, successfully pushed legislation to restrict citizen petitions. Part of her measure was struck down as unconstitutional in Citizens in Charge v. Gale.  Now the rest has been unanimously repealed by the state legislature.

Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus favored Groene’s bill, saying that legislators could use a more viable initiative check on their power. The unicameral’s attacks on citizen petitions were, he said, “reflective of a government that was afraid of its people.”

Now it’s peacetime in Nebraska.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Nebraska Win

 

Categories
Accountability ballot access Common Sense First Amendment rights general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Really Protecting Our Rights

Incentives matter. Which is why Ohioans have much to celebrate
this week.

Federal District Judge Michael Watson turned his previous temporary injunction against enforcement of Senate Bill 47 into a permanent injunction. That statue outlawed non-residents from helping Buckeye State residents by gathering petition signatures for an initiative or referendum.

The case is Citizens in Charge v. Husted. Citizens in Charge — where I work — protects initiative rights. Jon Husted is the Ohio Secretary of State.

But Judge Watson went further, declaring Sec. Husted’s office liable for damages to one of our co-plaintiffs, Cincinnati for Pension Reform. The judge found that “a reasonable official would have understood that enforcement of the residency requirement would violate plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to engage in political speech.”

Public officials have what’s known as “qualified immunity,” which protects them from liability when acting in good faith. A spokesman for Husted offered a defense: they were acting “on the assumption that the law is constitutional.”

“Some qualified-immunity cases are difficult,” countered election-law expert Daniel Tokaji. “Not this one.”

Ohio’s residency law was ruled unconstitutional in 2008, after Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign sued. In 2009, the previous secretary of state officially acknowledged the law unenforceable regarding all petitions. Yet, seeking to block citizen petitions, legislators passed it again, and Husted was quick to enforce.

Maurice Thompson of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, our attorney, cheered the “deterrence” this decision provides.

“If public officials from the governor down through the police know that they will be liable for enforcing an unconstitutional law,” he explained, “they are far more likely to take Ohioans’ constitutional rights seriously.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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