Schedule & Topics for Future Forums:
Education – 2/23
Civil Rights & Civil Liberties – 2/26
Economic Growth, Jobs, and Worker’s Rights – 3/3
Economic Justice/Poverty/the Social Safety Net – 3/6
Housing 3/10
Environment 3/13
Public Safety & Criminal Justice 3/18
Misc – What Are We Missing? 3/23
Please share widely!
The Democratic Party core values should include ensuring that all citizens have an opportunity to vote.
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p>To do this I believe that the Democratic Party Platform should support:
1) Early voting
2) Election day voter registration
Peter Porcupine had a post about this a few days ago… I didn’t agree with much of it, but part of it I did.
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p>If I commit election fraud, I’m on the hook for 5 years in prison, $10,000 in fines, or both. However, a legislator who places a vote for a legislator not present doesn’t face anything near as harsh.
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p>I’m not arguing to make “my” election fraud penalty smaller of course; I believe we ought to hold our legislators to very high (perfect!) standards when it comes to conduct for their votes on the floor.
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p> * If you see someone casting a vote fraudulently, you should be obligated to report the infraction.
* If you otherwise know a vote was cast improperly (ie the legislator was elsewhere at the time of the vote), you should be obligated to report the infraction.
* If you commit an infraction you should suffer immediate and harsh penalty. I’m talking get kicked off of Beacon Hill and lose your pension harsh. Anything less suggests that the very core of our democracy, fair votes, isn’t important for those in power.
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p>As a side note, yes, this means that legislators ought to be granted sufficient time to get from official meetings/conferences within the building to the floor to cast their vote.
Setting time frames and technical limits for lobbyists and contractors …it’s just more nibbling around the edges. We must have public campaign financing, or the donors and politicians will find ways to game the system. The public will end up paying far less if we simply pay for our public-servant recruiting and hiring process. And only then will we get officials whose interests are to provide fair and honest services.
There’s nothing in there now about ethics or transparency in government. That’s a huge omission that needs to be fixed.
as it should extend to all public employees.
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p>Too often public employees take advantage of the public, after being enabled by the Legislature.
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p>1. Authorities should not be afforded benefits that extend beyond the average State employee.
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p>2. The “double your pension” provisions should be eliminated from the State laws.
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p>3. Abuse of the disability system should be rooted out, and laws should be changed to limit the benefit to true disabilities.
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p>4. Public employees should not be allowed to ratchet up their pensions through appointed work that is not representative of their average work life.
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p>5. “No show” jobs, or employees who make jobs no show, should be eliminated and/or punished.
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p>Maybe these are relatively small dollar items in the overall scheme of things, but they are the type of things that infuriate the taxpayers, and lose credibility for the entire public system.
Massachusetts citizens voted in the very best antipay-to-play reform with a binding referundum named Clean Elections. Clean Elections called for the public funding of state offices after a candidate had indicated political viability by passing a threshold by raising a number of small contributions. The elegance and simplicity of the Clean Elections referendum required that public money – not special interest contributions that required a payback- pay for state elections.
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p> Clean Elections would have restored the true democratic process of having political campaigns run on the basis of ideas, not on an incumbent’s advantage in raising campaign funds. The door would have opened to candidates who demonstrated an aptitude for public office by virtue of a substantive campaign that engaged the electorate, hopefully in open debate with other candidates.
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p> The Massachusetts political class of incumbents considered Clean Elections the kiss of death. What! Campaign on ideas? Face challengers that might expose their voting record, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad?
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p> This was not to be. A subsequent referendum stopped the Clean Election movement in this state and the pay-to-play system continued on.
I’ve seen a number of specific policy suggestions, many of which I agree with. I really want to see us push for election day registration and get it in place in time for our next statewide election. It’s extremely frustrating that we don’t have it yet.
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p>However, when it comes to core values, the ones from which policy ideas stem, there’s one huge one that I think doesn’t get enough attention, and it’s the key idea behind democracy:
We are all better off when more of us vote and participate in the political system. Voting is not merely an individual act that serves an individual purpose, it is a systemic act that improves the functioning of the entire system. Political participation in the democratic system enriches all of us, and gives us all better government.
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p>Democracy works through an interlocking system of feedback loops. Voting is one of the key mechanisms that enables some of these feedback loops in our particular democratic structure, so it deserves special attention, although voting is not itself democracy (just as money is not in and of itself value): democracy is that interlocking system of feedback loops. The more of us vote, and the more of us participate in other ways, the better and more effective the entire system is.
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p>As Democrats, we believe that we are better off when they can meaningfully participate, and when they vote, whoever they are, as long as they are governed along with us.
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p>So many things can follow from this core value:
– Early voting and election day registration
– Public financing, to raise the ability of people with less money to participate as meaningfully in the system as the fewer people with more money can
– Open, verifiable, verified vote counting, so people trust the mechanism
– Allowing noncitizens to vote, because all of those who live here are governed by this government, and it will be a better government if it includes all the people it governs
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p>People may interpret the details differently, but as a core value, it needs to be stated. And it’s one of the big differences between liberals and conservatives: conservatives tend to only see the individual aspects of things, while liberals also see the systemic aspects.
I strongly agree with several of the comments already made:
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p>- early voting
– election day registration
– the core value of voting
– transparency (in general) and in the election process in particular
– public financing of elections (restore the Clean Elections law)
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p>Additions I would like to see:
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p>1. The current platform advocates for paper ballots. I would like it to go further, calling for paper ballots that can be visually verified.
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p>An example which passes this test would be a ballot which is typically optically scanned but which can be hand-counted for verification purposes. An example which does not pass this test would be a ‘paper trail’ receipt that is given the voter but which may/may not reflect the vote registered in the machine.
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p>2. Any voting and tabulation software should be ‘open source’, so as to guard against secret manipulation of data and destruction of the evidence.
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p>3. Radio and TV stations, which benefit from the use of public airwaves, should make available, at reduced charges, time for candidates to present their views and qualifications.