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Oct
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Ballot issues can be good things. The Cuyahoga County tax increase that just went into effect today. That should have been on the ballot. And the casino issue – while it should never have been on the ballot as a constitutional amendment, I am glad that, as a voter and resident, I could vote it down.
But mostly, ballot issues take up time, space and – most of all – money. And, as I used to argue with the previous purveyor of Buckeye State Blog, the whole idea that backers spend billions (oh, okay not billions but sometimes millions) to get people to first sign petitions and then to advertise for or against a particular initiative – well, I would argue that the process is antithetical to democracy.
That purveyor completely disagreed with me every time – at least on a practical level if not entirely on the philosophical level.
But now comes this Toledo Blade article about just how much money plays into ballot issues.
“You can only do it these days if you have money, and, as you can see, quite a lot of money, because you need to hire really good signature gatherers,” said Peg Rosenfield, election specialist with the League of Women Voters of Ohio. “Clearly, these folks [working to repeal the strip club law] didn’t.”
[snip]
Last week, the strip club effort hit a new low when two of every three professionally gathered signatures they submitted were deemed invalid by county boards of election. The invalidation rate was three out of four in Lucas County.
“Some of them are insulting, they’re so badly forged,” Ms. Rosenfield said. “Do they think election people are that stupid, that they can’t tell when they’re doing it in alphabetical order and in the same handwriting? It looks like they’re getting it right out of the telephone book.” Part of the problem, she noted, is that petition circulators are typically contract workers hired by independent firms and are often paid per signature when they submit the petitions, not for the signatures that survive scrutiny.
And, as though they were quoting me from my commenting back and forth on BSB last year about this very point:
“The way election law is written makes it very difficult for average Ohioans to participate in the democratic process,” said the American Cancer Society’s Tracy Sabetta, who served as the face of last year’s successful initiative to ban smoking in nearly all indoor public places.
You simply have no idea how I hate that. Much the way I hate how the law provided only 30 days to gather signatures to challenge the county’s passage of that tax increase in June.
It’s just not right.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:12 pm October 1st, 2007 in Civil Rights, Elections, Government, Ohio
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2 Responses to “Ballot issues bite: The money reason”
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Jill:
Ballot issues are a strange concept in a system of representative government, don’t you think? We don’t have them at the national level. How did they creep into our state constitutional structure?
I’ve always figured the Founding Fathers created a representative government because they wanted the great unwashed masses to feel it was “one man, one vote” but yet keep them from actually having a direct hand in lawmaking. They felt it was important to populate Congress with upper class men who they could trust to act rationally. We’ve outgrown that “upper class men” standard, but the point is that we want people who know what they’re doing in the job.
Because unfortunately, we can’t trust the public to be rational at all. It’s not because they’re stupid, but it is because they’re ignorant and apathetic.
When we have an issue on the ballot, it’s a crapshoot whether it will pass or not. Good stuff fails and bad stuff passes. A “Yes” vote mean you’re against the issue, and visa versa.
The proposed GIRFOF education amendment is one that really scared me. The Governor and the Generay Assy should be working that kind of stuff out. If we don’t like what they do, then throw the bums out instead of re-electing them over and over. But don’t send them back to their seats, then neuter them by governing through ballot issues.
PL
Paul, I agreement pretty much with everything you wrote. The only thing I would add is that I don’t imagine there to have been any malevolent intent or anything, as much as I don’t like what the founders thought. But this is because, I think, we do live in a time that is different than it was then. Even, it seems, that some absollutes have changed. That’s one of the reasons I have trouble with strict constructionists in courts.
Thanks for the comment.