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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Out Back Question of the Week

Today one of the Great and General Court subcommittees met to decide the fate of the "Home Rule" Petition to allow the Lowell City Council to drop the Preliminary (Primary) Election for City Council.

The question is, who from Lowell testified, and how?

The supplemental question is, how will the committee report out?

The big question for the voters is, does the City Council care about us?

Regards  &mdash  Cliff

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Cliff,
Joanne here, What do you think of doing the preliminary election similar to the American Idol voting. Maybe we could set up a call answering service where you call a certain number for a certain politician. Say, dial 1-800-xxx-xxx! for so an so; dial 1-800-xxx-xxx@ for so an so and so on. Think of the response we could get from the citizens who would never have to do anything more than make a phone call. That's not really much of an inconvenience as it is now. I would be willing to bet you a "scallop dinner" that if we took this route for all elections then voter "turnout" would be greatly improved. Thoughts??? Hope to see you and the misses soon.

C R Krieger said...

I think Joanne might have a point here.  I wonder what it would do to "voter turnout."

Of course there would be a lot of "technical issues" to iron out.

In my view, one would limit this dial-in voting to the "Preliminary" or Primary election for city officials.  But, even so, if the dial-in voting increased turnout for the City Primary, I think it would encourage such additional voters to then show up at the polling places, as they would be invested in the election.

I like it.  I will talk to a couple of people about what they think of it.

As I say, I would "prove it" over a series of local election primaries before I took it beyond that.

This idea of alternative voting approaches is not new.  In Oregon it is all by mail and in Washington State all but one county has all vote by mail.

Thinking.

Regards  —  Cliff

the other cliff said...

There are definitely technical issues to be overcome, but they are manageable. I do have two social questions to ask, in all seriousness. First, do we want a system where the economic cost of voting (in the pure meaning of that term) is reduced substantially below where it is? If it costs you little in the way of inconvenience to vote, surely the count will go up, but what will happen to the quality. You will find that a lot more people will vote, regardless of whether or not they even know or care about the issues. I want voters who are invested in the issue because they care about it, not because they voted in the primary to impress their friends.

My second issue is, is having more votes inherently a good thing? After all, politics are quite contentious now and we have trouble getting half the eligible voters to show up for a presidential election. How raucous would it be if we got 75% turnout? Heck, it might start to look like Europe.

As a bonus issue, if we had phone or e-mail voting with verification, would we allow people to change their votes before the deadline? If so, how would that affect elections once exit polls started coming out?

In conclusion, our present system is imperfect, but I'm a fan of it.

-the other cliff

Unknown said...

Zilla here, I have mixed feelings about making it eaiser to vote especially using technology to resolve it. The engineers too often get it wrong and I don't think that we can "unscrew" an election without bloodshed. So using technology isn't a good idea. Second, while in principle I'm in favor of more people voting I also recognize that there are too many people in this country who, and let's be honest here, are idiots. Having an uninformed electorate involved just gives me the willies, can anyone say Huey P. Long...but of course idiots won't know what I mean. We could go for a Robert Heinlein approach but I'm just not that much of a facist. So I guess that I'm a fan of the current system too. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." (Winnie C.)