Author: jpritikin

The Rose Institute, in conjunction with Claremont McKenna College Professor Ken Miller, would like to announce the recent launch of Miller-Rose Institute Initiative Database at http://initiatives.rosereport.org/. The database lists all successful citizen-driven ballot initiatives in the twenty four states where they are permitted. The database holds great promise for research in the area of direct democracy in the United States.

I had the pleasure on Monday of being on a panel with Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, author of “America’s Constitution: A Biography” (Random House, 2005), and, for a few more weeks, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. The panel was sponsored by the student chapter of the American Constitution Society, the center-left adversary of the hard-right Federalist Society.

Our topic, it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to hear, was the National Popular Vote plan.

Professor Amar is one of the intellectual fathers of N.P.V. Way back in 2001, just a year after Bush v. Gore pushed the country off a cliff, he and his equally brainy brother, Vikram David Amar, who teaches at King Hall, the law school of the University of California at Davis, wrote a three-part article demolishing the main arguments for the electoral-college status quo and outlining most of the elements of what was to become, five years later, the N.P.V. proposal. The Amar brothers are N.P.V.’s Locke and Montesquieu.

 

Anyway, at this panel, Akhil Amar made two excellent points that deserve to be underlined.

 

1. It is often said that the Framers came up with the electoral college scheme because they wanted to set up “a republic, not a democracy.” They abhorred anything that smacked of direct democracy.

 

This is untrue. They specified that the House of Representatives, which in their view would be the single most powerful component of the constitutional design, would be elected by the people. Most of them also favored popular election of state governors. At least as important, the Framers put the ratification of the Constitution itself to a vote of the people or what amounted to a vote of the people.

 

What the Framers objected to was not democracy per se, but to democracy based on inadequate voter information. While ordinary people could adequately inform themselves about local political figures, or about a document whose text they could read for themselves, they would have no way of garnering sufficient information to judge potential Presidents from distant places. Or so (many of) the Framers thought. If this objection was ever valid, it’s obviously obsolete now, when the average citizen knows more about the personalities, biographies, and beliefs of the leading Presidential candidates than about his or her local sheriff or legislator.

 

2. Anyhow, the real reason for the electoral college wasn’t all that high-minded guff about voter information, or even some noble desire to protect small states. It was to enhance the power of slaveowners.

 

Electoral votes are alloted to states not according to the number of voters but according to population, with the disfranchised slave proportion counted at a forty per cent discount. The three-fifths rule wasn’t as good a deal for the (white) South as counting slaves as whole persons would have been, but it was a good enough deal to allow them to dominate both Congress and the Presidency for most of the pre-Civil War period.

 

We don’t have to guess that this was the overriding motivation for going with “electoral” instead of popular votes. You won’t read about it in the Federalist Papers, but you can in the private diary James Madison kept at the Constitutional Convention. The Amar brothers pinpoint some evidence. On June 1st, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, the man who contributed the phrase “We the People” to the preamble, expressed support for popular election, noting that “Experience, particularly in N. York & Massts, shewed that an election of the first magistrate by the people at large, was both a convenient & successful mode.” On July 19th, Madison summarizes a speech of his own:

 

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

 

Now that civil war and the Voting Rights Act have allegedly “obviated this difficulty” for good, it might be time to liberate ourselves from that voters should be subjected to an elaborate process of “substitution.”

 

For links to the text of the Amars’ original articles, scroll about halfway down.

 

P.S. The day before yesterday, the Nevada Assembly became the twenty-seventh state legislative chamber to pass the National Popular Vote bill, which so far has become law in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii.

This Saturday I depart for Seoul to begin a speaking tour of universities in hopes of generating interest in the Korean National Initiative and jump starting a campaign to get it enacted by the people of S Korea. I am giving myself two months to test whether their is sufficient political will with the Korean people to empower themselves to make laws.

If their is sufficient response I will stay in Korea until an election is held. Success here will establish a new governance model to be emulated around the world including the United States.

This session the Oregon House has an opportunity to move on legislation to help put citizens back in the center of our state’s citizen initiative process.

House Bill 2895 calls for the creation of citizen panels comprised of voters from across the state, who will review measures that have qualified for the ballot and report their findings to voters statewide. The proposal is aptly named the Citizens’ Initiative Review.

The goal behind the reform is to provide Oregon voters with well-reasoned information as they make their voting decisions. It is a sensible alternative to the sound bites and overblown rhetoric that now assault voters during the election season.

As representatives of the League of Women Voters, we steadfastly believe in improving our system of government through citizen participation and reliable information. The Citizens’ Initiative Review approaches that same goal in an innovative way.

A Citizens’ Initiative Review engages a panel of 24 Oregonians in a public review of a statewide measure on the ballot. These registered voters, selected at random to represent the demographic and geographic makeup of the state, are convened over five days to hold an in-depth public deliberation on the measure under review. By participating in hearings where advocates and experts present background information, data, and the pros and cons of the initiative, the panel has the time to fully understand the issue and the diversity to consider competing points of view. It’s a rare opportunity to have a well-reasoned public discussion about these often-contentious issues.

After several days of testimony and deliberation, the panelists develop a "Citizens’ Statement" to report their findings as a new page in the Voters’ Pamphlet.

The League of Women Voters of Oregon evaluated a Citizens’ Initiative Review demonstration process on Ballot Measure 58 last fall. Our League evaluator found the process to be fair and balanced, with both sides of the measure given equal opportunity to present their cases and answer questions of the citizen panel. She observed that participants felt empowered by the process and appreciative of the chance to engage in this form of direct democracy.

We support HB 2895’s aim to expand a pilot of the Citizens’ Initiative Review process on one to three measures on the 2010 ballot and to print the citizens’ statements in the Voters’ Pamphlet. Continuing the pilot would allow for testing various ways to improve the process to make it as trustworthy, economical and logistically practical as possible. The 2010 review would be grant-funded, so the pilot would have no fiscal impact.

Establishing official, fair, and open public hearings on ballot measures, and then providing to all voters the findings of the Citizens’ Initiative Review, is one way to restore integrity to Oregon’s initiative process.

Just as Oregon was the first state to use the citizens’ initiative process, we are the first state looking at conducting a Citizens’ Initiative Review of ballot measures. The timing couldn’t be better.

Marge Easley is the President of the League of Women Voters of Oregon. Kappy Eaton is the Governance Coordinator for the League of Women Voters of Oregon.

On March 26, 2009, I felt a sense of generational pride in my government. President Obama was testing out an excitingly new means of representation by addressing public qualms and quandaries of the people via an online white house forum. That’s right, the internet. Now I’m not old enough to remember a time when the internet didn’t exist, a fact that has greatly influenced my generation. For better or worse, this is a fact that I am proud of, as it marks the end of accepted authority. In the digital age if there’s a question needing answered, you have nothing but your intelligence, hand-eye coordination, and a library card to stop you from finding entire communities faster than you can think them up.

So when I read that the man I voted for president would be utilizing the very implement that incalculably aids me and my many like-minded peers on a daily basis, there was a sensation of vindication.

Finally, a president who doesn’t need to have explained what "a google" is, maybe this will herald a renewed age of direct democracy. Upon visiting the forum, I was genuinely shocked to notice that 4 out of the 10 major issues (e.g The Budget, Financial Stability, Jobs) were dominated by pro marijuana legalization questions. Not only were the most popular questions by far pertaining to the ‘cannabis question’, but also the subsequent second, third and sometimes fourth most voted on questions in each category were also marijuana related. Surely this is not what the Obama administration had in mind when they polled the American people. But over 3 million votes were cast in either favor or opposition to these questions, with the general opinion seemed inextricably tied to this central point.

The President however limited his statements on legalization to:

"… whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation. I don’t know what this says about the online audience…The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

As a proud American, and responsible cannabis user, I take personal offense to this remark. It seems that our leader is proposing that the online community is populated by potheads, rather than concerned Americans. Do you mean to say we are too lazy or stoned to stand up and be counted at the tradition town hall meetings, or is it that we are too scared? It is, under current federal law, still against the law.

I’m not a criminal, and I’d like to keep it that way. I’m also a proud cannabis user, who like many of you would not admit to that on a government survey. So where can we meet, organize and lobby our interests without fear of retributions? Since 1965 20 million people have been arrested for the nonviolent offense of possession, so excuse me Mr. President if it’s a good way to save money. The point is this industry is in place, and not going anywhere. I agree you can’t think to fix the long coming financial problems facing America by simply legalizing it. Sure, an infusion of cash would replace the hemorrhage of money that is the Drug War.

Alcohol prohibition was always toted as the nation’s "great experiment", so why when presented with the freedom of personal choice, it seen as an outrageous debate not worth even discussing? I know you don’t want kids telling their parents the president said it’s ok to do drugs, but you did promise to always listen to the people, and tell us what was on your mind. I always thought President Obama was different not because he admitted to trying marijuana, but the alacrity with which he placed it in perspective. It didn’t ruin his life, damage his brain, or destroy his future. Well you know what, for some 20 million other Americans, it did, who knows how many of them wanted to become president.