Tag: elections

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ballot access general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers responsibility term limits

The Yellow and White Lines

term limits, elections, voting, limits, white lines, yellow lines, democracy

If I’ve heard it one million times, I’ve heard it ten: “We already have term limits; they’re called elections.” A statement usually offered as the beginning and end of wisdom regarding the problems term limits are designed to tackle.

Equally “profound” is the collateral claim that “the only term limits we need are an informed electorate.”

Such generalities “prove” too much. Any formal restraint of government could be thus airily dismissed.

  • “The only Bill of Rights we need is an informed electorate.”
  • “The only checks and balances we need are an informed electorate.”
  • “The only prerequisites for running for office we need are an informed electorate.”

If formal rules don’t matter, why write these things down or try to enforce them in light of principle and precedent? Just get your informed electorate and let the informed electorate handle it.

To preserve and strengthen our republic and our liberties, we do need an informed electorate. We also need many other things, including well-known, widely accepted, consultable, objective limits on government power.

One such limit limits terms.

Term limits on legislators, executives and even judges combat political corruption, empower informed voters, and give informed and capable electoral challengers more opportunities to effectively present their ideas.

The fact that a given political or cultural factor is crucial to the commonweal doesn’t mean that no other factors are also crucial.

Don’t tell drivers of cars that all they need are skills and gas.  You also need lines on the road — limits to keep us out of the ditch, and from head-on collisions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Why They Hate the First Amendment

Facebook, censorship, censor, first amendment, free speech, Citizens United, elections

Does banning Facebook in the weeks leading up to an election sound like freedom?

“The corrosive effect of social media on democratic life,” writes The New Republic’s Jeet Heer, “has led both French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make the same threat to Facebook: self-regulate or be regulated.”

But Macron doesn’t go far enough. “If fake news truly poses a crisis for democracy, then it calls for a radical response,” Heer insists.

“Many countries have election silence laws, which limit or prohibit political campaigning for varying periods of time ranging from election day alone to as early as three days before the election.” And Heer sees little reason not to apply such regulations to social media.

“What if you weren’t allowed to post anything political on Facebook in the two weeks before an election?”

This exactly parallels the prohibition of political spending “by corporations” before an election, as in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulation. Except here we have it directly affecting normal citizens.

The current excuse, “fake news,” appears to be defined by partisans almost entirely as the errors and lies and spin of their opponents’ side(s).

But since lying about one’s political enemies is at least as old as the Election of 1800, why is this different now?

Because, I submit, Facebook is just another area the folks pushing such obvious breaches of the First Amendment — politicians and most of the media — do not yet control.

Competition mustn’t be tolerated.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: by John Nakamura Remy

 

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Accountability folly general freedom government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Not Even with a Straight Face

CIA, foreign policy, elections, influence, interference, puppets

Is American foreign policy so foreign to our values that even those who have served at the very pinnacle of national intelligence agencies have trouble telling the truth?

“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Laura Ingraham, host of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, asked James Woolsey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1993 to 1995.

“Oh, probably,” Mr. Woolsey replied. “But, uh, it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid communists from taking over. For example, in Europe in ’47-’48-’49, the Greeks and the Italians, we, the CIA—”

“We don’t do that now, though?” Ingraham interjected. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

“Well . . . urrrrr, yum, yum, yum, um, um,” the old spymaster offered to laughter from both Ingraham and her studio cameramen. “Only for a very good cause,” he added with a sly grin, “and the interests of democracy.”

Interests. Of. Democracy.

Ha. Ha ha. Laughing yet?

Foreign Policy tells us that documents declassified in 2017 “shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down [elected] Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh . . . poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.”

Need more? There’s a handy database that lists undemocratic and illegal* shenanigans going on and on through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, up through President Obama to today.

“This broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the flood of reporting on the Russian intervention . . .” noted the New York Times last December.

Of course, our government’s interference doesn’t justify Russian government interference. But, we can only (possibly) control our politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “Meddling in other’s elections is a violation of international law,” Steve Baldwin writes in The American Spectator. “More importantly, U.S. law prohibits the use of tax dollars to influence foreign elections.”

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ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people national politics & policies

Monied Hopes Dashed

elections, Democrats, Republicans, left, right, CNN, Obamacare

Democrats had high hopes. Their come-back after the 2016 defeats seemed near at hand. After all, Trump is proving increasingly erratic and incompetent, and the Republican mis-handling of the ObamaCare repeal appears to be a disaster of ginormous proportions.

How could they not start taking seats in Congress back?

There were four open seats requiring new votes this late Spring. “Democrats tried an inoffensive moderate message in Georgia,” CNN’s Eric Bradner informs us. “They ran a banjo-strumming populist in Montana. They called in the cavalry in South Carolina and tried to catch their foe sleeping through a long-shot in Kansas.”

Democrats failed, 0-4.

Why? Well, the congressional vacancies were made by the new president’s appointments, and he may have targeted those districts that were especially safe. Nevertheless, CNN notes, “[t]he party got closer than it has in decades to winning some of the four seats — a sign they’ve closed their gaps with Republicans in both suburban and rural areas. . . .”

But there is a lesson here that CNN did not draw from the debacle. The much-lamented Georgia race, in which Jon Ossoff lost to Republican Karen Handel, was a race in which Ossoff out-spent Handel six to one in what is called “the most expensive House race in history.” And yet, somewhat oddly and perhaps hypocritically, Ossoff, the bigger spender, went on air complaining about money in politics.

All that moolah did not push him over the top. Ossoff and the Democrats — as well as the feckless Republican majority — might look for fewer excuses and stand for something voters actually want.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly local leaders media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

The Early Vote Worm

Greg Gianforte, Montana, U.S. House of Representatives, Congress, elections, voting, democracy, media

Last week was consequential for Greg Gianforte. Awfully.

The Republican businessman won the special election for Montana’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He also body-slammed a reporter. He now faces misdemeanor assault charges.

For which Gianforte apologized publicly . . . as he was declaring victory. Welcome to modern American politics.

Democrats claimed victory, nonetheless — with media cover to boot. “Republicans’ 7-point win in last night’s Montana election is great news for Democrats,” the progressive Vox headlined their report.

At Townhall.com on Sunday, I explained why that claim misses both the forest and the trees. Yes, Trump won Montana by 20 percentage points against Hillary Clinton’s mere 35.4 percent back in November, while Gianforte won last week by only 7 points. But Trump was lucky to be opposed by a very unpopular Hillary.

Moreover, at that same election wherein Trump trounced Secretary Clinton, Gianforte lost the governor’s race to a Democrat. Indeed, Gianforte performed 11 points better last week than back in November — winning, instead of losing.

How does that show Republican support slipping?

The message from the Montana special election is that early voting periods are far too long. Montana’s early voting began nearly four weeks before Election Day. The assault by Gianforte, with criminal charges, hardly mattered, because roughly two-thirds of Montanans had already voted when it occurred.*

Rather than a nearly month-long process, whereby a candidate can bank a majority of the vote before the campaign is over, let’s make Election Day a three or five-day period. Make it easy to vote, but let’s all vote together, with the same information.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* This means not only that Gianforte may have “gotten away” with his violent outburst, but that those voters did not have time to adequately appraise Gianforte on information they would have possessed and been able to act upon, with a shorter voting period.

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Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders responsibility

The Maine Thing

RCV, Ranked Choice Voting, initiative, voting, elections, democracy, Maine

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows voters to rank electoral candidates and not “waste” their vote in cases where their most favored candidate is* unlikely to win. RCV also requires a majority for election, not merely a plurality of the vote.

Last November, Mainers passed Question 5 to begin using this voting system for statewide races, state legislative races and congressional contests. Voters in Portland, the state’s largest city, already use ranked choice voting for several city offices.

Nonetheless, Gov. Paul LePage, who has won twice for governor without ever capturing a majority, opposes RCV, as do many state legislators, also elected under a different first-past-the-post plurality system.

Because Maine’s state constitution specifically mentions plurality winners for statewide officials and state legislators (in the General Election), legislative leaders asked the Maine Supreme Court for an advisory opinion on the constitutionality of the ballot measure. Earlier this week, the court ruled that Question 5 was not constitutional when applied to those specific offices and elections.

However, the constitutionality of RCV was not challenged regarding congressional elections or primary elections for the state legislature.

Now some legislators are proposing a constitutional amendment to enact the RCV that voters supported. Others are urging that the entire law be repealed — even the parts not ruled unconstitutional. They claim the new system is too confusing if not used for every office.

But Portland city voters use RCV for some offices and not others, without confusion.

Legislators should follow the court’s decision, sure, but also respect the vote of the people for every part of the measure not addressed by the court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Ranked Choice Voting also prevents wasted votes in cases where a voter merely expects or fears (even inaccurately) that his or her favorite candidate does not have enough support to get elected.

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Original cc Photo by Tim Evanson on Flickr

 

Categories
ideological culture political challengers too much government

Forwards ! Backwards ?

Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, France, French, elections, immigration, government,

France held an election over the weekend. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen came out on top, and will face each other in a runoff on May 7th.

Current polling puts Macron over Le Pen, 62-38. But a SkyNews reporter cautions: there is no certainty.

We in America have reason to respect that cautionary note. Our last election was an upset against the establishment candidate in favor of a wild card often dubbed “far right” and even “fascist” — which is precisely what Ms. Le Pen is being called.

Indeed, pitting a Big Government “centrist” (Macron) against an anti-immigrant protectionist (Le Pen) in the context of an economic slump and rising terrorism, and with neither candidate having much contact with limited-government principle, eerily echoes the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

But, on closer inspection, the parallels between the American and French contests appear inexact. Macron’s En Marche ! party* was created just over a year ago, while Le Pen’s National Front has continually found itself on the margins of power, despite its rise in popularity.**

Still, it is hard not to suspect that Ms. Le Pen could come from behind to upset the status quo. Macron is not invulnerable. The man worked, after all, in Hollande’s government, and Le Pen has characterized him as a socialist in a snazzy suit.

Macron is way ahead in the polls. And TV experts talk about how reliable modern polling is, while we in America . . . snicker.

But, since France lacks an Electoral College, can Le Pen really “Trump” the odds?

France will be in for a bumpy fortnight.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Amusingly, the party’s initials are identical to those of its founder, Emmanuel Macron. “En Marche !” (the extra space is there in party material) translates into English as “Forward!” or “On the Move!” and is formally designated as the Association pour le renouvellement de la vie politique (the Association for the Renewal of Politics).

** All the established, formerly governing parties are on the outs.

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Accountability ballot access general freedom incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies political challengers responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Votes Without Poison

ranked choice, vote, voting, democracy, clown, illustration

Strange election. So . . . round up the usual suspects!

Immediately after Hillary dried her tears and conceded, out came the Tweets, then the analyses: the “third parties” are to blame!

Over the weekend, I focused* on one such election post-mortem. The basic idea is not altogether wrong: minor party efforts together may have cost the Democrat her Electoral College advantage this time around, just as Nader’s Green Party run spoiled Al Gore’s bid in 2000 and several past congressional races have been spoiled for the GOP by Libertarians.

Is there a problem here? Yes. But do not blame the minor party voters. It’s the way we count their votes that is “problematic.” The current ballot-and-count system turn voters most loyal to particular policy ideas into enemies of those very same ideas.

When we minor party voters turn away from a major party — usually because said party tends to corrupt or betray our ideas, or make only small steps toward our goals — our votes aren’t so much wasted as made poisonous.

Because the candidate least preferred may prevail.

But there’s a way out: On election day, voters in Maine showed how to cut through the Gordian Knot. Voting in approval for Question 5, Maine now establishes “ranked choice voting.”

Under this system, you don’t “waste” your vote when expressing a preference for a minor party candidate. You rank your choices and, if your first choice proves unpopular, your second choice (or maybe your third) gets counted. So you don’t “poison” your cause.

Republicans and Democrats have more than enough reason, now, to adopt ranked choice voting across the country.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See yesterday’s links page to my weekend Townhall column for the basic references. But there were many, many articles on the Minor Party Effect, including a skeptical one by Sasha Volokh’s.

 

Ask the next question.

Questions Answered:

What is the effect of minor parties on major party outcomes?

What causes those effects, voter intent or something else?

Is there a way to prevent this, short of further sewing up the ballot access system to minor parties?

The Next Question:

What might our elections look like if people spent more time discussing issues and ideas … and less about class, culture wars, and sex crimes?

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ranked choice, vote, voting, democracy, clown, illustration