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ballot access national politics & policies political challengers

Instead of Spoilers

Last night on Stossel, the show’s eponymous host reminded his panel that Ann Coulter wanted to drown folks who vote for Libertarian candidates in close races where the Republican victory could be hurt. Deroy Murdock came down on Coulter’s side, saying that Libertarian votes did sometimes harm Republican candidates, as just happened, he said, in Virginia.

Stossel wonders if that’s true; there are reasons to suspect that Libertarian “third party” candidates draw also from Democrats and mostly from independent voters — and that many of the latter wouldn’t have voted at all.

But Stossel and his panelists did not bring up a simple solution to the whole problem, something I wrote about last year in my column “In Defense of Spoilers.” The Libertarian Party seems here to stay. And if Republicans want to do something about it, they could “open up the electoral system”:

They should work with open-minded, fair-play Democrats and end first-past-the-post elections in the United States. There are several ways to go: ranked voting methods, from Instant Runoff Voting to proportional representation, ending the election of Representatives from gerrymandered districts, electing them, instead, “at large.”

Ranked Choice Voting, especially, has advantages. We vote our preferences, and our preferences are counted.

If you prefer the Libertarian over the Republican, and the Republican over the Democrat, you vote that way, and your preference for “best” doesn’t destroy your support for “the good” or the possibly “good enough.”

Democracy doesn’t need to rest on the insane rubric of “the best is the enemy of the good.”

So, Republican majority, change it. And stop complaining.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Krist Novoselic

Voting is the engine that drives our democracy. It needs a 21st Century update. We need to move past partisanship and start to see the humanity in people.

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Today

Nov 7, war powers

The U.S. Congress overrode President Richard M. Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, on November 7, 1973. This resolution ostensibly limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval.

Categories
Today

November 6, Dominican R & Gandhi

On November 6, 1844, the Dominican Republic adopted its first constitution.

On the same date in 1913, Mohandes K. Gandhi was arrested for participating in a march of Indian miners in South Africa.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture Tenth Amendment federalism

Return to Federalism

As we make sense of this week’s sea change — of the Great Shellacking Democrats took on Tuesday — some caution is in order.

In 2006, voters did not choose the Democrats because of what they were or what they promised, but because of what they weren’t: corrupt, clueless Republicans. Now, Republicans should remember that they were mainly chosen because they aren’t Democrats: that is, hopelessly narrow-minded, self-righteous, and corrupt.

So, what should Republicans do?

Maybe it’s not to start out of the gate by repealing Obamacare, which its namesake would simply veto.

In Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, DC, voters approved the legalization of recreational marijuana use. In California, with Proposition 47, Golden State voters ushered in a new regime, downgrading many, many drug violations and former felony crimes to misdemeanor status.

This is the people of the states leading.

They are rejecting the “get tough” approach both parties have supported for decades, an approach that has had the dubious result of being most popular with public prison workers’ unions and the private prison lobby

Opposing drug use may be socially “conservative.” Politically speaking, however, granting government nearly unlimited police powers, and without regard to objective results, is not.

If the Republicans want to lead in Washington, they should follow the people in these bellwether elections. Back them up. End the Drug War and, with it, the Prison-Industrial Complex. Return criminal justice back to the states, where the Constitution originally put it. And where modifications can be more easily made.

Return to federalism. Return to reason.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

The Next Election

Elections are wonderful, even when the results are awfully hard to take. Last night in Arkansas, Issue 3 passed very narrowly — in a sea of voter confusion.

That confusion had been instilled by disinformation in the ballot wording.

The win for Issue 3 means the term limits on state legislators will now be dramatically weakened from six to 16 years in the state’s House and from eight to 16 years in the Senate.

Plus, a new commission appointed by legislators is now poised to give legislators a big, fat pay raise.

The politicians who schemed up Issue 3 are slippery smart. Give them that. They slipped a doubling of their allowed terms in office as well as a scam to hike their pay into a constitutional amendment featuring a popular partial ban on lobbyist gift-giving to legislators. Oh, and the measure will also add an extra year’s delay before a legislator can switch-hit to work as a lobbyist.

Still, the respected Talk Business/Hendrix College poll repeatedly demonstrated that telling voters what the measure actually did — the popular gift ban as well as the unpopular weakening of term limits — led voters to overwhelmingly come down against the ballot measure, weeks ago by 62 to 23 percent.

But on the ballot, while voters were told about the measure “barring gifts from lobbyists,” they were not told about the doubling of the term limit. Instead, the ballot language deceptively said the measure was “setting term limits.”

A strong grassroots campaign crisscrossed the state trying to alert folks, but confusion reigned. On Facebook, countless early voters were angry to find they’d been duped:

“I was fooled, we ought to petition to revote on that issue with wording that is straightforward and not so obfuscated.”

“I, too, was misled into voting for it. The ballot printed version is an out right lie!”

“It was set up to be tricky . . . I caught it, but there are a lot who won’t!”

“Dang! It is a trick question! I voted wrong!!!!”

One friend of mine, no fan of term limits, offered, “For all of our other differences, I’m with you on this. It’s a bait-and-switch designed to snooker the electorate.”

An Arkansas Term Limits leader noted that the Yes on Issue 3 campaign “pursued a campaign of silence, letting the deceptive ballot title do their work.”

Sen. Woods (R-Springdale), who co-authored the measure with a House Democrat, slyly told reporters, “I would advise anyone going to the ballots to read Issue Three and tell me it is not a good bill.”

“For this to fail,” he added, “it would send a bad message to law makers. Because, it would just show people aren’t necessarily that big on us working together.”

Woods even dubbed Issue 3, “bipartisanship at its best.”

The senator and the forces of boss rule are about to meet a bipartisan grassroots at its best.

“If this passes, it’s because many voters were tricked,” explained Kay Carico Wilson days ago. “Lots of people are saying they did not understand it and voted the wrong way. The interesting thing is that many Conservatives and Liberals are equally upset over this. We have found some common ground.”

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature; it’s not wise to trick the voters. To these deceivers, the politicians who cheated the people of Arkansas: There will be another election.

See you there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

November 5, Anthony

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony defied the law to vote, and was later fined $100.

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Today

November 5, Anthony, Douglass

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony defied the law to vote, and was later fined $100.

Categories
Thought

Finley Peter Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”)

An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.

Categories
term limits

My Simpler Solution

Merry Election Day! Despite this weekend’s proposal, in the New York Times, to “Cancel the Midterms.” The authors, David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, begin by lamenting the predictable pattern of midterm elections, especially in second-term presidencies. And then they say the very existence of midterms — the mere possibility of the House and a third of the Senate reshuffling every two years — “is harmful to American politics.”

The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. . . . The realities of the modern election cycle are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.


The nut of the argument comes down to the notion that it would be best to rig the game to avoid conflict and dispute for as long as possible so that an “agenda” — whatever that may be — can be firmly put in place.

It’s the very opposite idea of the Founding Fathers’, who were trying to set up a system of checks and balances to preclude big, barely popular change. And who feared a powerful executive.

The Midterm Cancellation proposal gets absurd towards the end, where the authors tack on legislative term limits — an awfully generous 24 years — to counteract the extended terms their proposal requires.

Counteroffer: let’s start with term limits. Real ones.

Break up the incumbency power in our sclerotic Congress; don’t rob the people of biannual input.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.