'Trow da bums out!'
Nov 10, 2006 09:41 | Election
So this is what democracy looks like! What an
election day it was!
Politicians have to be held accountable. Public services has to be an honorable profession. Governments must serve the public interest. Corruption is unacceptable.
This sounds sort of quaint these days, but this election showed that the fundamentals of democracy still lie there, in our hearts, even if we've all but given up on getting them.
And the way to get decent public servants -- aside from flooding them with e-mails and calls when they try something they shouldn't -- is to let them know that election time is accountability time.
But it won't be accountability time unless we do some basic reforms.
The first is to stop the buying and selling of our government. We have to get the legal bribery of campaign contributions out. So we have to force them to pass public campaign financing laws. In Massachusetts, we even voted to do that in 1998, and they repealed it in the dead of night.
And the reason they could get away with that is that the legislature has exempted itself from the "sunshine laws," the Open Meeting and Public Record Laws it wrote for other government bodies to obey. So our lawmakers can hash out these deals and ram them through on voice votes and no one even knows what's happening. So the second thing we have to do is this: The legislature must be made subject to the "sunshine laws."
Third, we need term limits for all offices. No one is so good that power doesn't corrupt them eventually. No one is so smart that s/he can't be replaced. In Massachusetts it's almost impossible to "t'row da bums out" -- we have a 98% incumbent re-election rate. (Boston may be even worse!) Working in secret on behalf of big-money donors, they keep themselves in power forever.
It's not democracy if we go to the voting booth -- and there's no viable choice. So: Fourth, we need to allow free expression of more political choices. We need "Instant Run-off" voting. Almost half of the state's registered voters are not enrolled with a party! They vote reluctantly for Democrats or Republicans -- or drop out of voting altogether because they want something different, and have no way to demand it at the polls without "throwing away" their vote or worrying about handing victory over to the mainstream candidate they want least -- the so-called "Nader" effect. Instant Run-off lets voters rank their candidate choices, and automatically re-assigns their votes to the next choice if the first doesn't have enough to win. With Instant Run-off, you could have voted for Ross, or Mihos, to send a message, and ranked your preferred Dem or Republican second to make your vote count. Independents will have a lot more influence on the D or R agenda if they can bring in the winning margin. I wonder how the independents would have done under Instant Run-off...we'd have seen the true support for their platforms. The initiative for "ballot freedom," or "fusion voting," described in our 10/29 blog posting, didn't pass. But it was on the right track. Now it's time to start an initiative for Instant Run-off, which gives the independents their own candidates and their own voice.
So, now that we've flexed our electoral muscle and seen its power, let's put it to use and get what we need -- with the help of the public offficials, or without it.
Politicians have to be held accountable. Public services has to be an honorable profession. Governments must serve the public interest. Corruption is unacceptable.
This sounds sort of quaint these days, but this election showed that the fundamentals of democracy still lie there, in our hearts, even if we've all but given up on getting them.
And the way to get decent public servants -- aside from flooding them with e-mails and calls when they try something they shouldn't -- is to let them know that election time is accountability time.
But it won't be accountability time unless we do some basic reforms.
The first is to stop the buying and selling of our government. We have to get the legal bribery of campaign contributions out. So we have to force them to pass public campaign financing laws. In Massachusetts, we even voted to do that in 1998, and they repealed it in the dead of night.
And the reason they could get away with that is that the legislature has exempted itself from the "sunshine laws," the Open Meeting and Public Record Laws it wrote for other government bodies to obey. So our lawmakers can hash out these deals and ram them through on voice votes and no one even knows what's happening. So the second thing we have to do is this: The legislature must be made subject to the "sunshine laws."
Third, we need term limits for all offices. No one is so good that power doesn't corrupt them eventually. No one is so smart that s/he can't be replaced. In Massachusetts it's almost impossible to "t'row da bums out" -- we have a 98% incumbent re-election rate. (Boston may be even worse!) Working in secret on behalf of big-money donors, they keep themselves in power forever.
It's not democracy if we go to the voting booth -- and there's no viable choice. So: Fourth, we need to allow free expression of more political choices. We need "Instant Run-off" voting. Almost half of the state's registered voters are not enrolled with a party! They vote reluctantly for Democrats or Republicans -- or drop out of voting altogether because they want something different, and have no way to demand it at the polls without "throwing away" their vote or worrying about handing victory over to the mainstream candidate they want least -- the so-called "Nader" effect. Instant Run-off lets voters rank their candidate choices, and automatically re-assigns their votes to the next choice if the first doesn't have enough to win. With Instant Run-off, you could have voted for Ross, or Mihos, to send a message, and ranked your preferred Dem or Republican second to make your vote count. Independents will have a lot more influence on the D or R agenda if they can bring in the winning margin. I wonder how the independents would have done under Instant Run-off...we'd have seen the true support for their platforms. The initiative for "ballot freedom," or "fusion voting," described in our 10/29 blog posting, didn't pass. But it was on the right track. Now it's time to start an initiative for Instant Run-off, which gives the independents their own candidates and their own voice.
So, now that we've flexed our electoral muscle and seen its power, let's put it to use and get what we need -- with the help of the public offficials, or without it.
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