Tag: elections

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ballot access general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people Regulating Protest

Three Bad Propositions

initiative, petition, power, money, elections

Two propositions on this November’s California ballot, Propositions 8 and 11, have found an opponent.

“Both would have voters decide very narrow union-management conflicts in two relatively small medical service sectors,” explains Dan Walters, long the dean of California columnists. Unions are sponsoring Prop 8, which “purports to limit profits in clinics that provide dialysis treatments to sufferers of kidney failure.” Ambulance companies are behind Prop 11, which would “require ambulance crews to remain on call during meal and rest breaks.”

Walters thinks it “foolish to expect November’s nine-plus million voters to make even semi-informed decisions about their provisions, much less understand how dialysis clinics and ambulance services operate, or should operate.”

Well, yes, but this criticism applies to government universally. Legislators don’t understand how every business or industry functions, or should function, either. Even when politicians pretend to comprehend, by what right do they micromanage other people’s businesses and labor contracts?

Freedom, not government regulation, should be the default position.

But Walters’ fix runs against this logic. He thinks that upping the required percentage of signatures for ballot placement “by half . . . might discourage the misuse of the system for issues that cannot be fairly and rationally decided by voters.”

Don’t bet on it.

As Walters himself admits, making it tougher and more expensive to petition a measure onto the ballot won’t block the well-heeled: “any interest group with a few million bucks and an axe to grind can qualify a ballot measure, regardless of their merits.”

But it would disenfranchise grassroots groups.

Defeat bad measures; don’t destroy the democratic process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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incumbents insider corruption

The Politics of Exclusion

locks, Republicans, Democrats, democracy, Libertarians, Greens

“The mainstream media screams about Russia stealing elections,” says U.S. senatorial candidate Dale Kerns, “but behind the scenes they pull the strings to keep the duopoly in control.”

Mr. Kerns, who is running in Pennsylvania as a Libertarian in a four-candidate race, has had the rug pulled out from under him. Early on, the League of Women Voters had assured him that he would be able to participate in televised candidate debates in Philadelphia. That opportunity was dashed as the date of the event neared.

“Make no mistake, this is cronyism,” insists Kerns, who notes that “big media corporations collud[e] with big government political parties to keep out competition.”

Eric Boehm covers the scandal/not-a-scandal over at Reason. The early promise of inclusion came from the League, and it was “other organizers” of the event who decided that the Libertarian and Green candidates’ polling numbers were low enough to excuse exclusion.

You might wonder why debate organizers would want to have less interesting debates. But remember: the two entrenched parties’ candidates want to win. Period. The last thing they want are challengers from other parties included, because those challengers can only peel off voters from them.* And though the major-media hosts may wish to seem non-partisan, they almost never refrain from taking a side. 

I do not (and cannot) know which reason contributed more to the Philadelphia renege, so will let you hazard your own guesses. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Which helps explain why the parties tend to “cheat with both hands,” as Nicholas Sarwark, the Libertarian candidate for the mayorship of Phoenix, Arizona, put it.

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Photo from Max Pixel

 

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Accountability ballot access folly general freedom ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people national politics & policies political challengers responsibility U.S. Constitution

Should Non-Citizens Vote?

voting, elections, democracy, illegal, aliens, migration, borders, citizens

“A lot of people would like to say this is an immigration issue. It’s really not,” offered Gary Emineth, the head of North Dakotans for Citizen Voting and a candidate for state senator.  

“It’s really about preserving the right for U.S. citizens, and in our case, North Dakota residents, to only be the voters in all elections across the state of North Dakota,” added Emineth. “And that’s why we want it in the constitution.”

Turning in more than 35,000 voter signatures on petitions last Friday, Emineth and others placed a constitutional amendment on this November’s ballot that, if passed, would make voting the exclusive right of U.S. citizens in North Dakota.

Elsewhere in the country, Emineth points out, non-citizens are already voting — in Chicago and San Francisco, and in 11 cities across Maryland. Moreover, campaigns are underway across the country to give non-citizens the vote — in California, Connecticut, New York City, Boston and Montpelier, Vermont.

Opponents claim the North Dakota measure is completely unnecessary, as the state doesn’t currently allow non-citizens to cast a ballot, nor has any city yet attempted to allow non-citizens to vote. But Emineth’s goal is to keep it that way.

Moreover, University of North Dakota Law Professor Steven Morrison acknowledged to The Forum in Fargo that “the proposed amendment does clean up what could be a grammatical loophole since the word ‘every’ doesn’t conclusively exclude non-citizens from voting. . . .”

It is a very simple proposition: Do you want voting to be the exclusive right of U.S. citizens? Or should non-citizens be allowed to vote?

Coming to a ballot near and Fargo.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* With some help from Liberty Initiative Fund.

 

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Accountability general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders national politics & policies political challengers term limits

The Other Maine Thing

ranked choice voting, democracy, initiative, referendum, election, voting, Paul Jacob, voting reform, Maine

Tuesday’s biggest election news was the victory for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine. This is the second statewide vote for this reform, which allows voters to rank the candidates by first choice, second choice and so on.*

Voters first passed it in 2016, but the next year the voters’ “representatives” in the legislature repealed the law, overturning their vote.

Undeterred, RCV supporters filed a referendum and again went out and gathered enough petition signatures to refer the legislature’s repeal to a vote of the people. On Tuesday, Maine’s voters vetoed the legislature, keeping Ranked Choice Voting.

Initiative and referendum sure are helpful.

RCV is not partisan; it requires the winner to have some level of support from a majority of voters and fixes the wasted vote problem. In Maine, however, the Republican Party opposed. On election day, Republican Gov. Paul LePage even threatened not to do his duty and certify the results.

“Paul Jacobs (Vice chair of the [FairVote] Board) whom I once knew and thought was a good American,” a Republican friend posted on my Facebook page, “has helped unleash the hounds of Hell” . . . adding that “now the voters are so confused by the terrible procedure that voting will be a nightmare this Tuesday!”

Yet voters used the new voting system for the first time Tuesday in candidate primaries before deciding Question 1 on their ballot — about keeping RCV. As one Portland voter put it, “It’s pretty easy to do, despite the negative publicity.”

We need more control over government with our vote. And when voters speak, politicians should listen.

It wouldn’t hurt political activists to listen, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I’ve discussed the idea in this space many times — there’s more information on how it works here.

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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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