Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

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initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Eleven Fiftieths

Eleven states have “bottle bills,” legislation requiring vendors to collect a deposit on each container they sell of soda pop, iced tea, energy drinks, etc. It basically mimics the old, voluntary system of recycling, where bottling companies would pay people to return glass bottles, for reuse.

When I was a kid, cheaper materials (aluminum, plastic) made the old system uneconomical. So environmentalists pushed through legislation in Oregon, and then elsewhere, to create government-mandated recycling systems.

Oregon’s legislature just passed a “sweeping revision” of the bill, upping the deposit amount from five cents to ten and expanding the program. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute testified at a legislative hearing against the revision. According to Charles, bottle deposit recycling conflicts with curbside recycling, which Charles argues is far more efficient — or at least easier to use than lugging containers back to return centers, which are usually sticky, smelly, and. . . .

Well, Charles didn’t talk about the stink. One of my Washington State informers did.

You see, Washington not only lacks a bottle bill, such efforts fail with larger percentages each time one hits the state’s ballot. But the beverage containers sold in Washington have the same deposit/return guarantees as in Oregon. So some Washingtonians transport their in-state purchases — sans five-cent deposit — across the border for unearned returns.

You might think that fighting such cheating would be of more concern to Oregon lawmakers than making it even more lucrative to out-of-state profiteers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

A Bad Sign

A Centerville, Virginia, man made news when he agreed to his wife’s demand that he stand at a busy intersection wearing a sign emblazoned “I Cheated: This is My Punishment.” His merciful wife ended the punishment after just a couple hours.

In recent years, a few judges have sporadically sought to shame criminals in similar fashion. Back in 2007, several people convicted of shoplifting opted to avoid a longer jail sentence by donning a sign outside the store they had ripped off, which read, “I Am a Thief, I Stole from Wal-Mart.” But Wal-Mart soon opted out of such spectacle.

Now, the California State Senate has passed new legislation to force folks to wear similar signs. But not for committing any crime.

Unless petitioning one’s government is now criminal.

State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier’s Senate Bill 448 seeks to harass and belittle the citizens who circulate petitions by making each wear a sign “on his or her chest” that reads “PAID SIGNATURE GATHERER” or “VOLUNTEER SIGNATURE GATHERER.” The sign would also inform the public which county the petitioner is registered to vote in, or must say, “NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE.” The lettering must be in at least 30-point type.

Sen. DeSaulnier calls this “transparency.” But transparency isn’t necessary for all petitioning, apparently: SB 448 doesn’t require those collecting signatures to put a state legislator on the ballot to wear such a sign.

It applies only to those who dare use the citizen initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Give Me Fever

Today, the U.S. Conference of Mayors premiers its new video, “Recall Fever: Stop the Madness,” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The video is part of a “public awareness initiative” to convince folks that recalling their mayor is “destructive” and “costly.”

“This archaic rule,” said U.S. Conference of Mayors chief executive Tom Cochran recently, “is being put to sinister use.”

But just how sinister was it when 69 percent of Ogden, Kansas, voters recalled their mayor last year? What would you do were you to discover, after the election, that your mayor had served more than a decade in neighboring state prisons for burglary, aggravated assault and involuntary manslaughter?

The 88 percent of Miami/Dade, Florida, voters who unseated their mayor last month don’t seem sinister, either — his self-dealing and cronyism, on the other hand, surely qualify.

Though the anti-recall event doesn’t feature any mayor who has actually been removed from office through recall, more sensible testimony can be found from the ranks of the ousted: Carmen Kontur-Gronquist of Arlington, Oregon. After online pictures of her posing scantily clad on a city fire truck created a firestorm, voters recalled her by a mere three-vote margin. Still, her reaction was philosophic: “[T]he democratic process took place, and that is a good process that we have in the United States, and it’s fair.”

Maybe Cochran and his cabal of mayors should keep their shirts on . . . so to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Pols Pack It In

At long last, it’s over.

Citizens have won. Our rights to initiative and referendum are now immutably safe and secure, forevermore, from disingenuous assault by the powers that be.

All power-lusting, citizen-mocking career politicians everywhere have in unanimous concord acceded to the democratic virtue of the citizen initiative process. The binding promissory compacts have been signed, wax-sealed, stamped, and bar-coded by all pertinent parties.

As of today, this first day of April, 2011, every obstructionist politico throughout the land has agreed in solemn ecumenical council to desist said class’s hitherto drearily unrelenting efforts to hamstring, handcuff, harry and harass anyone who’d dare try posting ballot questions on important political issues. (We’ve got the proof on video!)

Yep. No more will politicians multiply the arbitrary requirements to foil their attempts to opacify government transparency, as they tried in Utah.

No more will politicians force every petition circulator to wear privacy-violating ID badges, as they were eager to do in Nebraska.

No more will politicians clog the initiative process with fictitious accusations of wrongdoing, their M.O. in Colorado.

No more will . . .

Continue reading “Pols Pack It In”

Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall

Saving Grandma

Republican legislators in Utah are trying to kill Grandma. Don’t dismiss this as a smear. It’s true.

Only spell it GRAMA, which is an acronym for Utah’s 20-year old Government Records Access Management Act, Utah’s open government and information access law. A furiously fast four days after legislators first introduced a bill to gut the open records law, it sailed through both legislative chambers and was quickly signed by the governor.

House Bill 477 changes the core of the GRAMA law, mandating that citizens must prove they deserve access to records, rather than the previous rule requiring government officials to show cause for why a document should not be released. The legislation also exempts text messages, emails and voicemails from being disclosed, the better to keep lobbyists and special interests out of the limelight.

Thankfully, Utah has a statewide process of initiative and referendum. Already a petition to put HB-477 to a referendum is underway. Unfortunately, the task is arduous: The sponsors need 100,000 voters to sign in only 40 days.

To add extra burden, legislators have passed Senate Bill 165, outlawing citizens from using electronic signatures for just such petitions.

Now the furious Utah electorate, joined by an angry media, is creating enough heat that politicians are seeing the light. The Governor is calling a special session to repeal HB-477. And a lawsuit may be filed any day now to strike down the unconstitutional, anti-democratic SB-165.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Voters Boot Mayoral Marauder

On March 15, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez got the boot, with almost nine out of ten county voters (88 percent) agreeing to get rid of him. The Miami Herald calls the event “the largest recall of a local politician in U.S. history.” Brandon Holmes of Citizens in Charge calls it “the most significant recall election since California ousted former governor Gray Davis in 2003.”

Alvarez was shown the door for larding aides with hefty pay raises (from $185,484 to $206,783, for his chief of staff) and increasing the salaries of other county employees while hiking property taxes 18 percent in the name of preventing layoffs. Meanwhile, the mayor tooled around town in a taxpayer-subsidized BMW Gran Turismo.

It all seemed like a racket, hardly consistent with the clean-up-government platform on which Alvarez had campaigned. The mayor showed further contempt for voters when he tried to stop the recall vote, twice going to court to block it. It also didn’t help when reports surfaced that the mayor had granted paid leaves to a dozen transit workers, at least one of whom used the time to campaign against the recall effort.

Pundits often describe elections as a referendum on the incumbent. They are, but only partly. Voters everywhere need the power to hold an instant referendum on incumbents who have disastrously demonstrated their incompetence or rapacity. Sometimes these guys need to be stopped in their tracks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

An App for That

We’ve had debit cards for most of my adult life. Regularly, people sign their names on electronic pads to obtain medication, credit, what-have-you. You can order books and music and nearly anything online, from your computer, your smartphone, or your new iPad.

It’s high time to take democracy into this new era.

At least, Michael Ni thinks so. And I agree.

Last year, Mr. Ni brought a signed ballot initiative to the clerk’s office in San Mateo County. He did not use anything so archaic as ink. Or a pencil. He signed the document using the screen of his iPhone, and he delivered it to the designated agent via flash drive.

It was rejected.

And so began a lawsuit, Ni v. Slocum, to upgrade the State of California’s initiative process. Mr. Ni runs Verafirma, a company that has produced technology that, you might say, puts another “i” (or is that the “e”?) in “initiative.” The technology works on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the Verizon Droid, and is slated for other smartphones and similar post-PC devices.

Mr. Warren Slocum, named defendant/respondent, admits that the technology “is transformative.”

Recently, Twitter and Facebook have helped foment and organize revolutions. But the statewide citizens initiative, a bulwark of democracy in half the states, is lagging behind, technologically.

It’s time for government to accommodate the habits and desires and sheer convenience of the masses.

It’s time to say, “Democracy: There’s an app for that.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Keeping Up with the Arabs

It’s open season on Middle East dictators — but I’m a little jealous. Greater freedom and democracy may be coming to Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain, but what about us?

The last two decades Americans have asserted themselves, changing control of Congress several times as well as passing term limits and other reforms directly through numerous statewide citizen initiatives.

Have our elected representatives responded by facilitating such democratic participation? Not on your life!

This year, many state legislators came into session hell-bent on blocking the citizen check of initiative and referendum.

In Colorado, legislators have proposed a constitutional amendment making it harder to place initiatives on the ballot. It would also mandate a 60 percent supermajority vote to pass a constitutional amendment, allowing deep pocket special interests the power to defeat reforms popular enough to win 59.9 percent of the vote.

Last November, Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment to make it a little easier for citizens to petition an issue onto the ballot. Now, just months later, state senators narrowly passed an amendment that would make the same process much more difficult.

Currently, Nevada citizens must gather signatures in each of the state’s three congressional districts to qualify a statewide ballot issue. Legislation is pending to increase this requirement from three petition drives to 42 separate petition drives — one for each of the 42 state legislative districts.

Thus our “representatives” seek to stop the people from representing themselves.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

A Fraudulent Anti-Fraud Bill

The theory behind Washington State’s Senate Bill 5297 — now worming its way through Olympia — seems to be that the people can’t be trusted to legislate, so the more hurdles thrown up at the initiative process, the better.

But the bill itself shows just the opposite, revealing its legislative supporters as careless, heedless of facts, and nastily bigoted towards some folk and against others.

The truth? Washington State has had only one known case of signature fraud. A Service Employees International Union official repeatedly just made up names and signatures.

She’s confessed and awaits sentencing.

So why add SB 5297’s reporting requirements for signature gatherers? To stop frauds such as this?

Well, no. SB 5297 exempts union petitioners!

Par for the course. Politicians in not a few of the 24 states that have statewide initiative rights try such things, all the while talking about the evils of fraud.

The facts? After surveying public records, Citizens in Charge Foundation reported, last year in “Is the ‘F-word’ Overused?”, that “cases of verified fraud or forgery are not pervasive in initiative or referendum petitions. Furthermore, many of the ‘reforms’ passed by state legislatures to address fraud have shown no positive results.”

Fortunately for Washingtonians, initiative activist Tim Eyman has bashed the bill and nearly every state newspaper, usually editorializing against Eyman, has instead lambasted the legislation. Citizens are rallying. Several legislators have stood against it, and taken away much of its teeth and claws.

Now it’s time to kill the beast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability folly initiative, referendum, and recall

A Modest Proposal for Madison

“Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”

Well, Woody, tell that to Democratic state senators in Wisconsin. Or, should I say, in Rockford, Illinois . . . hiding from the Wisconsin police.

They’re not wanted for any crime. Wisconsin state troopers would simply take them into custody and deliver them to their worksite: the state capitol in Madison.

Unemployment soars, and folks with cushy jobs go underground. I hate to be so boringly practical, but people should show up for work or let their employer(s) know that they are resigning. Not showing up is irresponsible. (Of course, these are politicians.)

And the whole biz is about responsibility. Wisconsin Democrats don’t want to vote on Republican Governor Scott Walker’s proposals to make government employees contribute 5.8 percent of their pay toward their lucrative pensions and 12.6 percent toward their medical insurance premiums, and to end collective bargaining for benefits and work rules, while keeping it for pay.

These are legitimate issues for the legislature. Democracy is about voting on them — even when you won’t win. But by lurking next door in the Land of Lincoln, Democrats can deny the quorum necessary for the legislature to do business.

Citizens have one immediate recourse: Recall.

Under Wisconsin law, no elected official can be recalled in their first year in office. But eight of the 14 shirking senators could be recalled right now. Were a mere two of them recalled, Republican senators would alone constitute a quorum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.