Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall term limits too much government

Don’t Copy Chávez

Americans eager to weaken various limits on political power here at home should pay closer attention to news from abroad.

Around the globe, killing presidential term limits is high on the to-do list of aspiring presidents-for-life.

Autocrats also dislike the right of citizen initiative. Even when they abstain from trying to kill initiative rights altogether, they often seek outrageous restrictions on them, or even stoop to harassing petitioners and voters.Hugo Cloned

One such enemy of the people was Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, now dead. Chávez was an equal-opportunity attacker of citizen rights. He expropriated businesses, bullied media, once even ordered soldiers to fire on anti-Chávez protesters (they refused). He also succeeded in eliminating presidential term limits.

In 2003, his government arranged for the public release of the names of Venezuelans who had signed a petition to recall Chávez. The names were stolen from the office charged with overseeing the petition drive and leaked to a pro-Chávez legislator, who then published them on his website. Many signers lost jobs, loans, and other opportunities controlled by the state.

American foes of term limits, initiative rights, and other constraints on concentrated power may think there’s no comparison. But every chipping away at protections against tyranny is dangerous.

While it is true that no single limit on power can substitute for all the cultural values and ideas that underlie our rights as free citizens, it is also the case that institutions and culture reinforce each other. The foundation of a building has more than one cornerstone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

People of the Solution

We suffer for our art. Yesterday, I sat through four excruciating hours of legislative hearings before the Ways and Means Committee of Maryland’s House of Delegates. I was waiting to testify on behalf of Citizens in Charge against House Bill 493.

For 20 years before last November, not a single referendum made it onto the Maryland ballot. Why? The state has the country’s most draconian rules for verifying petition signatures. An attorney running his own petition effort had his signature disallowed because he did not sign one of his two middle names or write the initial.

Most states use the standard of “substantial compliance” — if they can tell it is the signature of the registered voter, they count it, even if it doesn’t appear exactly as written on the voter registration record. Maryland’s strict compliance, on the other hand, disallows the signature of “Joe” rather than “Joseph.”

But you can’t keep good people down. A group called MDPetitions.com, led by Delegate Neil Parrott and April Parrott, his wife, found a way to provide online help in filling out the petition correctly, so that people’s signatures could count. They petitioned three separate bills to referendums last November by working both online and on the streets.

They lost all three, but in the process they brought the right to referendum back to life in Maryland.

Which brings me back to House Bill 493, against which I finally got to speak for five minutes. Among its myriad provisions to knee-cap petition efforts, most distressing is the one making it illegal to provide citizens with their voter registration information to help them fill out a referendum petition online.

Yes, the legislature is in session.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall video

Video: Washington State’s Inititiative

Washington State’s TVW channel, a cable channel covering government and public issues, here takes up the issues behind I-517:

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initiative, referendum, and recall

The Initiative Initiative

This morning I’ll stand in Washington State’s capitol in Olympia to turn in more than 340,000 voter signatures on petitions — enough to place Initiative 517 on the ballot next November.

I’ll be there representing Citizens in Charge, the major funder of the initiative, joined by Eddie Agazarm, former head of Citizen Solutions, and Tim Eyman, the leader of Voters Want More Choices.

I-517 strikes three critical blows for protecting the state’s citizen initiative process: (1) providing more time to gather signatures, (2) protecting the First Amendment rights of people circulating or signing a petition, and (3) guaranteeing issues will be voted on if sufficient signatures are gathered.

Currently, Evergreen State petitioners are allowed only six months to gather petition. I-517’s one-year petitioning window will give less well-funded grassroots groups a better chance to place an issue onto the ballot.

Petitioning is “a guaranteed First Amendment free speech right and it deserves protection,” points out Mr. Agazarm. “I-517 sets penalties for interfering with or retaliating against petition signers and signature gatherers.” Such harassment has been happening with greater frequency in recent years.

Tim Eyman is best known for his tax cut initiatives, but I-517 is close to his heart because of his experiences petitioning against red-light cameras. In each of his campaigns they were sued by “out-of-state red-light camera corporations with their lawyers funded by camera profits, and city officials with their lawyers funded with our own taxpayer money.”

I-517 simply requires that initiatives backed by enough signatures be voted on by the people. Even when an initiative is precluded from taking effect, for whatever legal reason, a vote of the people can help educate public officials.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom individual achievement initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

It’s a New Democracy!

Another New Year.

Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?

When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?

After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.

Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.

And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.

Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.

Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.

But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.

Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.

Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative . . . and a few unashamed exclamation points!!

This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

No Particular Agenda

Agenda-less improvement of Colorado’s constitution is the goal of a “group of Colorado’s top civic leaders, bipartisan in its makeup,” according to the Denver Post. All they want to do is correct constitutional inconsistencies.

The difficulty of getting the revisions is so acute that many of the state’s “top civic leaders” believe that it is time again to press for a constitutional-review commission empowered to send proposed changes to the voters directly, via multi-subject initiatives that can substantially revise, rather than simply amend, the state’s governing charter. (A single-subject rule obtains for hoi-polloi signature-gatherers.)

Must be nigh impossible to get a question on the ballot the way things stand now, eh? But — wait — one of the Civic Leaders pushing for a commission, Bob Tointon, laments that people “are frustrated by the issues that get on the ballot so easily in Colorado.” And Colorado’s Future, the main organization pushing for the commission, has always argued that it’s too darn easy for the mere people to post an initiative.

Which is it? It’s too hard to post a question onto the ballot, or too easy?

Both. It’s too easy for the general public to use the initiative process, but it’s too hard for Civic Leaders to scrub voter-approved initiatives out of existence.

Opponents of this elitist brainstorm worry that the proposed Super-Commission would seek to undermine the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a popular citizen initiative passed two decades ago limiting government spending and requiring voter approval of new taxes. The fear is legitimate.

The long-standing agenda of this cast of Civic Leaders is no secret: kill TABOR.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Better Than a Thousand Boneheads

H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, when they took over the early 20th century journal Smart Set, served it up with a great motto: “One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads.” That’s how I feel about my readers. I almost always enjoy the comments section of ThisIsCommonSense.com, and sometimes learn something important.

I especially enjoy it when my readers show they are on the right track, thinking of reforms that exhibit a sense of both justice and savvy use of incentives and disincentives to restrain the political class. Jennifer Gratz suggests “making the hurdle higher for politicians to get on the ballot”:

Tie ballot access for state-wide candidates to the same burden as initiatives. Names only appear on the ballot if they meet the same signature gathering threshold as a state-wide initiative: same requirements, same laws, same restrictions, same burdens.  Win in one state and politicians may stop messing with the I&R process. . . .

Clever.

As I reported this weekend on Townhall.com, Michigan legislators are in “voter suppression” mode again. It’s no surprise, since politicians tend to “have their own, almost personal, reasons to disdain direct democracy. They see citizen action as direct competition. And so their ‘reform’ ideas so far put forth run the usual gamut of insiders’ vexation with ‘outsiders.’” Perhaps the only permanent solution to constraining their lust to restrict citizen input is to constitutionally put them on the same footing as citizens.

What better place than ballot access for statewide offices?

Were party-supported candidates and incumbents all required to get the same number of signatures onto the ballot as initiative measures, the insiders would just have to lower the required number of signatures.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall links

Townhall: Voter Suppression

This weekend’s column at Townhall.com covers the perennial legislative itch to suppress citizen input — this time in Michigan. Go on over, but come back here to check out links to relevant articles:

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initiative, referendum, and recall video

On the Road in South America, Part Three

Last Friday, at the 2012 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy in Montevideo, Uruguay, Paul interviewed Daniela Bozhinova, a Bulgarian Green Party and direct democracy activist. Daniela spent the better part of a year studying initiative & referendum in the United States as a Fulbright scholar and you might be surprised by what she has to say.

Paul returns from his South American travels today.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall video

Video: On the Road in South America, Part Two

Taking a few moments away from the main events of the Global Conference on Direct Democracy, an interview:

More to come.