The Double-Majority

This last week we had a primary election in Oregon. Turn-out was pretty bad. The only races creating any buzz were the Democratic and Republican primaries for Governor -- and quite frankly, the leaders on each side weren't all that different from each other. So hardly anyone voted.

But there were some tax levies in some jurisdictions, and for a new tax levy to pass in Oregon, it not only has to have 50% of the votes cast, at least 50% of registered voters have to participate: A so-called "double Majority".

So any time there's a tax levy on the ballot, and it's an off-year or primary election, the people working to pass the levy end up working their butts off just to get people to vote at all. They may have a popular cause with the people who are willing to vote without having their arms twisted, but if enough people don't vote, it doesn't matter at all. In other words, you can vote no by simply not bothering to vote. You essentially are voting no if you don't vote.

I saw some snooty guy on TV saying something like, "Well, that's what they get for trying to sneak something by us in an off year." How pompous can you get?

If someone doesn't have a strong enough opinion to vote one way or another, it is my belief that they are giving up their vote. They're abstaining. Abstentions are not the same as no votes. If you don't want something "snuck by you", then vote! How hard is that???

The people trying to pass tax levies aren't trying to sneak anything by anyone. They had to get it put on the ballot. People get to see what's on the ballot ahead of time. Newspapers, television stations, radio stations, and even bloggers look at what's on the ballot. And they don't conspire to sneak things by everyone else. That doesn't happen. If people don't know about what's on the ballot, it's because they avoided that information. Nothing was snuck by them. The people trying to pass the levies are doing it at an off-year election because that's when they need to get the money. If you need money for the 2006-07 school year, for example, you're not going to wait until the 2008 Presidential election, or even the November 2006 general election.

If you want to vote down a tax levy, then vote. If you don't vote, that means you don't care. It's as simple as that.

That said, I'm probably never going to vote in favor of a tax levy. Why? I shouldn't have to. That's not the way our form of government should be working.

Our form of government is a republic. That is we elect legislators and executives at each level of government to handle the running of the government. We don't have monthly town hall meetings where everyone gets to vote on everything. Our job as citizens is to elect people to represent us.

The essence of the job of an elected official is to identify common needs that the government should be handling, and then funding the actions of government. They should not just be deciding how much is spent. They should be deciding how to get that money to spend. It's their job to tax us fairly.

If we don't like the way they're doing their jobs, then it's our job to elect someone else to represent us. Pretty simple concept, isn't it?

Well, this process breaks down in two ways. First, instead of being responsible voters that elect the right people, we have created laws that prevent our elected officials from doing part of their job. We insist that they're not qualified to represent us, and that the republic form of government isn't good enough for us. If we're going to do this, then why do we bother with the sham of electing people in the first place? Don't even have elected officials if we're not even going to let them govern.

The second thing that happens is some of our elected officials have no backbone. They don't want to take a position on a controversial issue, so they'll sent it back to the voters. No need to take a stand. You can blame the outcome on the voters, and come out smelling like a rose.

Well, I don't like it when either of those things happen, and I'm asked to vote on a tax levy. Ultimately it doesn't matter to me whether it's on the ballot because we castrated the legislature, and aren't allowing them to implement a needed tax, or if it's on the ballot because they were too cowardly to take a stand. It's not my job to vote on tax levies.

So whenever a levy comes on the ballot, count on me to vote against it. And I would like to see everyone vote against these silly things, too. But I would like to see them vote by actually casting a ballot, not by deciding not to vote. If you don't care enough to vote no, I don't want your vote to count as a no, even though I'm voting no, and I'd want you to vote no.

The republic form of government works well on it's own. We shouldn't be perverting it by requiring "double-majorities", or by circumventing the whole form of government by putting tax levies on the ballot. Let's get back to the way it's supposed to work, and elect people to represent us, and then allow them -- going as far as insisting that they do their job.

That's how I see things.