< PREVIOUS ] [ 1998 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Now that we've survived another election, it's time to
ponder some procedural reforms. Like all reforms, there is
every chance they will make things worse (or at the least,
produce novel and unanticipated consequences), but as the
saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
1) More ballot information. Granted, our ballots are already immense, but my proposal would add only one letter to the listing for certain initiatives.
This idea is not original. I'm borrowing it from the term-limit zealots -- that is, the group of elitists who think we're too stupid to know when someone has been in office too long, and therefore keep shoving term limits at us by statute, by amendment, even by tampering with the ballot.
At one point, they wanted some notation on the ballot
that a candidate refused to abide by the voluntary term
limits
that the zealots had proclaimed.
(One angle they missed might be more interesting -- a notation that the candidate in question was violating his own term-limits pledge.)
My suggestion would apply to initiatives -- that the
letter P
appear next to the listing for those which
had paid circulators.
Colorado once banned paying people to circulate petitions, on pretty much the same grounds that it bans paying people to vote -- there's a limit on what one should be able to purchase in the political realm.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled that writing checks to petition circulators is a form of free speech, and thus Colorado's ban was unconstitutional.
So we're stuck with these extended ballots. Adding a
P
won't make them any longer, and if we have to let
people purchase proposals on them, why not make sure the
public is so informed?
2) Ballots that work. The first general election that I covered in my journalistic career was that of Grand County in 1974. Most cities had voting machines then, but Grand County still used paper ballots.
And so, all of us gathered in the county clerk's office on election night had to wait until after midnight, because the judges were slow counting the Hot Sulphur Springs precinct.
Chaffee County, where I've lived since 1978, had voting machines. We were usually out of the clerk's office by 7:45 p.m. on election night.
Now everybody seems to use these cardboard ballots which are scanned by computers to give instant tabulations.
Except they don't. I just read about a precinct in Boulder County where they're still not sure of the outcome, more than a week after the election.
Here in Chaffee County, where the results were known 45 minutes after the polls closed with those cumbersome and primitive voting machines, the precinct returns were still trickling in two hours later.
In Gunnison County, the ballots were missing one line on the bar code, so they wouldn't scan, and the judges had to draw in the line, delaying the count until the wee hours of the morning.
It appears that elections are running at about the same speed as when Grand County counted paper ballots by hand nearly 25 years ago.
So, the next time some salesman comes along with an improvement in election technology, can't the state make sure it's really an improvement before adopting it?
3) A one-week post-election moratorium on the use of
certain phrases like former pro wrestler Jesse The Body
Ventura,
just elected governor of Minnesota.
If Ventura is anything like most Americans, he's held a variety of jobs over the years. Professional wrestlers may be bigger and stronger and more agile than the rest of us, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether they're better at public administration than anyone else, which is what we need to know.
And besides, it's refreshing to see a candidate who
means it when he talks about a smaller government
--
he has proposed decriminalizing marijuana, which would mean
a sharp reduction in the number of police, spies, snoops,
informants, prosecutors and jailers now swilling at the
public till.
Three simple reforms, and now a warning to metro residents. Weather permitting, I'll be at the Cherry Creek Tattered Cover at 7:30 p.m. this Wednesday. As you might have suspected from the venue, there are commercial reasons (related to book royalties, but let me assure you that many of the proceeds go to a scholarship fund that assists young Colorado women whose last name starts with Q) for this expedition.
Besides, why should ballot circulators be the only ones who profit from signatures?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1998 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >