Reply #27: Blackwell Apparently Wants To Shift Power To Those Who Don't Vote [View All]

[Algorem]

Minority Rule: Ken Blackwell Apparently Wants To Shift Power To Those Who Don't Vote

http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3357&POSTNUKESID=5fe657ff8724772b78cdab4786c031c7

By Rick Perloff

Majority rules. It's the established way to reach consensus in contests spanning the playground, the boardroom and the state house. Except perhaps in Ohio.

A clause in the proposed Tax Expenditure Limitation (TEL) amendment, embraced by Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell, suggests that a school levy that has the support of a majority of voters could still fail. The proposed amendment says that local school levies require the approval of a majority of registered voters in the particular district. So a levy that garners overwhelming voter approval could fail, if the majority of registered voters sit out the election.

This is a weird and disturbing wrinkle on majority rule; people who choose not to vote could trump the will of those who show up at the polls. It's precedent-shattering.

Dr. John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, cannot think of one case in which this has occurred. "Americans of all stripes, whatever their ideologies, have a simple understanding of democracy, and the core of this is majority rule. The amendment runs against the grain of hundreds of years of the practice of democracy, including the colonial experience."...




Ohio Politics: There Is Another Way: Instant Runoff Voting Could Help Bridge the Divide

By Greg M. Schwartz

http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3336&POSTNUKESID=5fe657ff8724772b78cdab4786c031c7

...IRV is a system that lets voters rank their preferences. For example, you can rank a Green first and a Democrat second. If no candidate wins a majority in the first tally, all but the top two vote-getters are eliminated and everyone else's second choice is counted until a majority is reached. This way, progressives don't have to worry that voting Green will waste their vote and wind up helping the Republican candidate, as Ralph Nader supporters supposedly did in the 2000 presidential election. Likewise, conservatives who favored Ross Perot in 1992 could have had George H.W. Bush as their second choice. In this way, a true majority consensus is revealed...

Most Ohioans can be excused for knowing nothing about IRV, due to lack of media coverage about it. But it was rather dumbfounding to hear an expert in political journalism say that he had never heard of it. IRV is used in a number of European countries, as well as San Francisco and Burlington, Vermont. It is now being considered in other communities around the U.S. Larkin's answer was a true moment of cognitive dissonance, because he had until then demonstrated a keen grasp of Ohio politics. Yet at the same time, his ignorance of IRV suggested that he is a 20th-century journalist at a time when Ohio desperately needs 21st-century journalism.

One could argue that this anecdote illustrates exactly how the mainstream media's (MSM) paradigm of political journalism is broken. Most MSM outlets follow a horse-race agenda that is set by the two major parties. They do little of their own research into ways that the system might be improved, as if we're living in Utopia here. It's for this reason that independent news sites and blogs are rapidly surpassing the mainstream media for content that delivers any meaningful discussion about improving the state of the planet...

Brown later asked all the students present to find five others who were undecided or unregistered for the 2006 elections and educate them about the issues. During the Q&A, I posed the IRV question, asking if he would support IRV in national elections. Unlike Larkin, he'd at least heard of IRV. But he sidestepped the question and spoke of being vigilant about electronic voting vulnerabilities and other electoral improprieties.

instantrunoff.org

fairvote.org/irv/