As a perpetual proponent of incresing voter turnout, I enjoyed considering the story on NPR about Rethinking The Tuesday Vote. I’m not sure when voters would be noticable less busy than Tuesday – especially considering that we would not want the vote to be on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday as each of those days is sacred to one major religion or another. If we ever find an easy way to increase voter turnout that would not cost lots of money we should do it. (I thinkthat changing the day of the week would be easy to implement so long as there is advanced warning.)
Tag: civic participation
I really liked this challenge from Obi wan Liberali related to the current FISA revision bill.
So to my Republican friends, I lay the challenge before you. If you support the FISA bill going before the Senate, justify and defend that support. If you oppose the bill, speak up to your Republican U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett.
Personally I have already contacted my senators, but I would be very interested to hear of someone trying to justify support for the bill.
Despite what some people may think, my outlook on life is not based on how politically active my fellow citizens are. If it was, this report from the Deseret News would have made today really lousy.
Utah now has the nation’s worst voting participation rates.
We should have participation closer to 65% like Minnesota rather than 36%. We should also have more than 58% voter registration (in fact we should have more than the 67% national average).
Today I am hoping that Republican primary voters show that they can see through party connections to select a candidate who might actually be qualified for the office of State Treasurer by selecting Richard Ellis to represent the party on the November ballot.
There are other races where I have a preference, but no others that I could vote in.
With the news that WordPress.com is banned in Brazil because of some inappropriate blogging by someone, Lorelle makes this observation:
I think bloggers around the world have become apathetic. Lazy. Uninspired. Dumbed down. Honestly. When the term echo chamber was coined, it was a good label for all the regurgitation of content spread all over the web, drowning individual voices. Self-interest blogging is pervasive. What happened to altruism and using the blog publishing platform to support freedom of speech and bloggers around the world?
What happened to us? Why am I not seeing protests and opinions on this issue all over the web? Why isn’t the banning of three million WordPress.com blogs a big deal? Why aren’t we talking about this instead of the latest iPhone gizmo and useless SEO techniques? Why didn’t people get angry and protest loudly when WordPress.com blogs were banned in Turkey, China, and other countries? WordPress.com continues to be banned in places – why aren’t we talking about this?
. . . I’m asking bloggers around the world to take a stand and let their voices be heard when others can’t. Let not millions of bloggers be blocked and banned for the sake of a couple of idiots. You don’t send an entire city’s population to jail because two people break the law. (Note to Lorelle – in Texas you can do exactly that.)
What really struck me about this observation is that it is not limited to blogging in any way. Because it is so easy to shout out your frustration – using blogs, YouTube, letters to the editor, or any other easy way to blow off steam – many people have settled into inaction when it comes to actually doing anything to make a change about those things that they don’t like.
Inaction on the part of most people to the minor inconveniences of a .05% tax hike are the reason that a few people who stand to gain millions of dollars from that tax hike are able to get the tax raised over the muted objections of the vast majority of people who have nothing to gain from the hike. (I’m not talking about any specific tax hike here, I’m talking about principles of politics and human behavior.)
It’s time to do more than what is easy, blowing off steam in a blog or a letter to the editor, and start doing what is hard but important, attending public hearings and caucus meetings, actually reading the text of bills being considered by our government. Then we have to do more than write a letter to our representatives – we have to talk with our fellow citizens and urge them to action as well. We have to inspire them to action on issues of importance to us – otherwise we deserve whatever government gives to us – or takes from us.
Categories
Straight Party Tickets
While thinking about the importance of voting my mind led me back to a personal belief that voting a straight party ticket with one mark is a bad thing for government. I have nothing against someone choosing to cast all their votes for one party, but they should do so for each candidate – parties are not supposed to run the government, elected individuals are.
The only argument that I can imagine in favor of the straight party option on a ballot is that someone might accidentally vote for the wrong candidate when they mean to vote for candidates from a single party. Imagine that they vote D, D, D, D, D, D, R, D where that R was a candidate for the school board that they accidentally mixed up the name since there was less advertising for that race.
This is where technology can help us. Since we have already moved to touch-screen voting machines (here in Utah as well as many other places) we could change the straight party selection so that instead of casting our votes for us that selection would make the candidates from our chosen party stand out (change color, larger font – there are plenty of options) but the voter would still be expected to select the individual candidates for their votes to be cast in each race.
When we recognize that most “news” is really entertainment it’s easy to see that politics is really a sport. John Florez is absolutely right in saying It’s time we all join the game and back some rookies. Assuming that more people actually join the game sometime before election day John suggests:
Maybe this time voters will elect those candidates who will work in the public’s interest rather than being influenced by special interest money; and who will concentrate on exercising their “oversight responsibilities” — monitoring and enforcing the laws they pass — that incumbents have ignored. Maybe they can do “take-aways” regarding outdated and cumbersome laws that now fatten government at taxpayers’ expense and bog it down with process and no results.
Until voters stop reading incumbent’s mailings and start rooting for those who really believe government belongs to the people, the lobbyists will continue making their “drops” and make government work for them. Unless voters consider legislative candidates who take their oversight responsibilities seriously, rather than allowing them to write more laws, our government will get fatter. Voters who keep voting for the same team without looking at the player’s performance become part of the problem. Accountability is trash talk unless someone is there to make sure things get done and there are consequences.
Even if many voters take the time to get informed and participate in the process it’s possible that many incumbents would win and return to the seats they already hold. It’s all too easy for each incumbent to blame “the system” or their fellow legislators (especially those in the other party) for any existing problems that the voters see. That is why the invitation to “back some rookies” is important. In Utah that generally means that you should support a democratic party candidate. The only exceptions would be if there is some reason why the democratic candidate is not qualified for the position they are running for, or if there is a rookie on the Republican side of the race. If there are two qualified rookies then any vote you are comfortable with is a good vote, otherwise give preference to any rookie who looks like they are up to the job they are seeking over any incumbent.
We need to establish a pattern of voters kicking out incumbents (it’s not good enough to just have a regular turnover of incumbents retiring) so that candidates who win (thus becoming incumbents) will have a large incentive to be responsive to the voters rather than the party or anyone with deep pockets.
I had planned on participating in last night’s caucus meetings, but life intervened and I was not able to. That being said, I am still interested to learn what happened in those caucus meetings for my precinct (Lehi-08). I would love to know the outcome of the Republican and Democratic caucuses, especially the Democratic caucus I planned to attend. If anyone was at one of those, or knows how to get information on who was elected to positions in either party in this precinct please let me know.
Categories
Open Congress
It becomes more and more clear each day how powerful the internet can be as a tool to improve our political process by enabling citizens to be informed. A great example of that is OpenCongress.org. The purpose of the site is to provide information on bills and members of congress. It only took me about two minutes to find 9 feeds on the site that any serious political blogger should have (of course the 9 feeds vary depending on where you live). For each member of the House or the Senate there are feeds for every roll-call vote (voice votes can”t be accurately tracked), for blog entries related to that person, and for news stories related to that person. The nine feeds are those three feeds for each of your senators and your representative. Everyone who is serious about politics should be aware of the members of congress who they have the chance to elect. For the Utah 2nd Congressional District those feeds are:
- Bennett in Blogs
- Bennett News
- Bennett Votes
- Hatch in Blogs
- Hatch News
- Hatch Votes
- Matheson in Blogs
- Matheson News
- Matheson Votes
I have long admired the way Misty Fowler has widgets showing the recent votes of her representative and senators in her sidebar. I don’t know if I will display this kind of thing in my sidebar, but I will definitely be following them in my feed reader. Now I wish I had a site like OpenCongress at the state level.
In a meeting with LaVarr Webb this morning two topics really stuck with me that seem to illustrate the most important political problems that we face as a nation. The particular issues we talked about were at the level of our state government, but both issues apply equally well to our federal government and often in more local government settings as well.
The first of these two topics that we talked about was the need for ethics reform – specifically gifts to legislators. Webb has close experience with politicians at the legislature over many years and he talked about how those legislators are often frustrated that people view or suspect them as being corrupt. He said that in his experience they rarely are corrupt but he believes that they can and should address this issue because our state legislature does not have strong safeguards in place against corruption in the event that someone were corrupt. I immediately thought about the Change Congress movement being pushed by Larry Lessig. Lessig articulates the problem as being one caused not by bad people but by “good people working in a bad system.” I believe that his primary method for changing the system is applicable to all such cases. We should persuade our candidates to commit to:
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- Not take lobbyist or PAC money
- Ban earmarks (this problem seems most acute at the federal level)
- Support public financing of campaigns.
As citizens we can request that our candidates make these commitments. This can be a filter by which we can determine for ourselves which candidates are serious about changing the bad system. Personally, I will never support a candidate who will not commit to these principles over a candidate who has made this commitment. (And I will ask any candidate I hope to support to make this kind of commitment.)
We later got onto the issues of the violation of the principles of federalism. This is when government tramples the rights of individuals or lower levels of government. This happens so frequently in small ways that many people think it is how the system is supposed to work. Here the solution is that citizens must insist at each level of government that individual liberty and the sovereignty of lower levels of government be carefully protected. Obviously there are some cases where the good of the whole overrides the choice of a part but everyone should be as careful to guard against running over their neighbors with the ideas that they favor as they are at complaining when they feel imposed upon by the ideas of others (and sometimes we need to be more vocal when we feel that we are being bullied by the enforced ideals of others).