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Someday we may come to realize that politics is a rough and seedy competition, instead of a method for producing secular saints. Until that day arrives, though, we keep seeing purification plans, and this year's Colorado ballot offers an assortment of reforms for our voting system -- all of which should be voted down.
Let's start with Amendment 27, campaign finance reform. It's a noble idea, reducing the influence of money in politics. But when you reduce the amount of money that anyone can give to a campaign, it means the candidates have to find more contributors.
Assume that it will cost $1 million to run for a given office. Which gives the candidate more time to see regular citizens: A sugar daddy who donates the whole million, or hustling 10,000 contributions of $100? As long as the contributions are promptly and properly reported, I don't have a problem with big donors. I'd rather our candidates hung out with only one or two millionaires, rather than whole herds of them.
Further, you can't stop candidates from spending their own money. So if you've got a multi-millionaire running against a person of normal means, who's able to spend the most? Isn't this effort to take money out of politics'' just putting monied people into politics''?
Even if Amendment 27 succeeded in sanitizing our legislative races and the like, it wouldn't cure a big money problem. We have the initiative system, whereby anyone can circulate petitions and put something on the statewide ballot, then spend money promoting the issue.
Colorado tried to make it illegal to pay people to gather signatures. That seemed sensible, but the U.S. Supreme Court believes that billionaires have a constitutional right to purchase legislation, and voided Colorado's restriction on paid signatures. So no matter how much money we take out of the legislative elections, we'll still have big money in the initiatives -- initiatives that don't go through committees and hearings and other aspects of legislative deliberation.
Amendment 27 wouldn't remove big money from our political system. It would just shift the big money to initiatives. That doesn't seem like enough of an improvement to bother with.
Amendment 28 provides for mail ballots in almost all elections. One argument is that it's more convenient. That doesn't work in this household, since our polling place is just across the street. On election day, I just look out the front window until I don't see many cars parked, which means there's no line, and walk over and vote.
Physically going to the polls is a civic ritual, something that makes me feel more like a citizen than sitting at the kitchen table and filling out some form and then remembering to mail it in time.
I can imagine some potential security and fraud problems with mail ballots, and as for privacy, what's to prevent an abusive spouse or parent from forcing another person's ballot to be filled out in a certain way?
Mail ballots also encourage people to vote early -- often too early, since important things may emerge toward the end of the campaign season.
There is the argument that this increases turn-out, since more people vote when there's a convenient mail ballot, as opposed to a possibly inconvenient trip to the polling place. That's similar to an argument in favor of Amendment 30, which provides for Election Day voter registration.
But why is increased convenience such a good thing? The people who vote in elections directly or indirectly make important decisions about how we live and work.
With these reforms,'' we will be giving more power to people who won't take the trouble to find the courthouse (or even the driver's license office) and register to vote at least 30 days before the election. Do you really want such sluggards to have more influence over your life and work?
With mail ballots, we also give more power to people who think it's too much trouble to find their polling place and then spend a few minutes there marking a ballot. Do they really deserve to have any political power if they're that lazy, or so consumed with other matters that they just can't find time to exercise their franchise? If they don't think voting is important, why worry about them?
This isn't to say that registration and voting should be maliciously difficult, the way it was for African-American citizens in the South 40 years ago. Any willing citizen should be able to vote.
But I see no benefit in going out of our way to accommodate the unwilling citizens who seem to think that registration is a big hassle and going to the polls is just too much trouble. Why empower these dolts? Do you really want them to have more to say about how you live and work, about how your tax money is spent and about what laws you must live under?
If you're at all sensible, you don't. There are reforms that might be improvements, but Amendments 27, 28, and 30 would just make things worse.
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