Of course it's bagels to donuts comparing Boston's mayorship with Kennedy's role. Yet, that is a powerful argument that proponents of local term limits need to confront directly.
Similarly, at-large Councilor Steve Murphy argued against term limits for his body. He cited the instutional memory he drew on as a new councilor a dozen years ago when he first joined.
The anti-limits folk also offer easiily dismissable and even silly arguments. The worst may be the disingenuous one that every municipal election is a term lmit. Doing anything they call artificial or arbitrary really only restricts voter choices and power.
The pro-limits side did and can easily shoot holes in what appears to be self-serving calls to stay in office. We can and do measure the increase in voter participation and candidates running when there are open seats. As Councilor John Connolly noted, the combined power of incumbency, money and influence of special interests actively discourages participation from all angles.
What if?
Back to Kennedy…the Senate does not have term limits and is highly unlikely to ask for them. Consider for a moment though what would have happened there and in Massachussets if Ted had faced an 18-year limit.
It is certain that he would not have run off to fill his pockets in the private sector. With his strong drive for public service, his powerful passions and visions for the state and nation, and of course his family money, he would have driven toward his goals in other ways.
Perhaps term-limited Senators with such mindsets would run the term, work in established or new foundations or think tanks for a bit, and then run to return to the Senate. It is easy to see that a model like that might invigorate and re-inspire those like Kennedy. Separating themselves from both the comfort of incumbency and the routine of the position should be a political whetstone for them. Sharper minds, rested emotions and clarified visions…
To the pork issue, if all Senators had an 18-year limit, what would happen to the earmarks, public-works projects and similar goodies that the most senior and best-committeed of them provide for their states? Would that be a crippling loss for the best-connected states or a net gain for the nation in decreasing waste and questionable spending?
I'd love to read you thoughts. I'm still musing.
~Mike
A problem with incumbency is that challengers tend to split the vote… and so there’s a risk of being a challenger that another person may challenge.
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p>With IRV, it’s much easier to throw your hat in the ring, because additional challengers may well help you by bringing out more new voters who may give you their “2”.
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p>Yeah yeah, Condorcet, blah blah. I agree that IRV isn’t foolproof; no voting system is. However, if you want to encourage a wider spread of candidates, and if you want to make people feel like they can come out and support their candidate without “wasting” their vote, and if you want to feel like every candidate, regardless how minor, adds to the political discourse, I think you move to IRV.
Please explain. I know I should know this. Instant runoff or something? Please help.
It works like this (for a single winner race):
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p>n candidates run, where n >= 2.
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p>Each voter ranks his favorite candidates, beginning with a “1” for his favorite, a “2” for second favorite, etc. A voter can rank up to all n candidates, or fewer if he or she chooses.
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p>When the votes are counted, all ballots are placed in the pile corresponding with the “1” vote. If a candidate has 50%+1 vote, he wins. If not, whomever is in last place (ie has the shortest pile) is eliminated. Those specific ballots are redistributed to their next highest candidate (in this case, “2”). Any ballots which don’t have a “2” marked are removed.
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p>1. Does a candidate have 50%+1 of the ballots? If yes, win. Else
2. Find which candidate has the least number of ballots.
3. Redistribute each of the ballots in that pile to the next highest ranked candidate on each ballot.
4. Goto 1.
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p>
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p>What’s nice about this no candidate is pulling/stealing/competing against a similar candidate. For example, a conservative can’t win with 40% of the vote against a liberal (35%) and a green (25%). Likewise, a liberal can’t win with 25% of the vote against a conservative (20%), a theocrat (20%), and a flat-taxer (20%), and a right-to-bear-arms-to-hell-with-the-well-regulated-militia (15%).
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p>As a result, parties which have similarities can welcome each other into the race — in MA, the green candidate wouldn’t really threaten a decent Dem because the green candidate would pull out new people who would put the Dem as their “2” and likewise many Dems would put the green as their “2”. They don’t split the vote and allow the GOP to win.
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p>It’s not really a hard thing to voters to rank. It’s true that some voters won’t know all the candidates — but it’s also true that those candidates are unlikely to win anyway.
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p>P.S. This is not quite what Cambridge does — but it is similar in a number of ways.
is that you pretty much have to have access to all the ballots from a central location in order to do the count. That doesn’t scale to well for large elections and would create chaos in a recount situation.
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p>Almost any other ranked voting scheme would be better.
It scales just fine as long as you report in to “home base” at the end of every iteration. Once every precinct has reported in, you know which candidate is eliminated.
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p>If you want to get really techie, there’s no reason why the ballot can’t be scanned one at a time after 8pm, linked to a central computer, and IRV’d virtually. You’ve got paper backup, and can even print out all the combinations and the count for each one locally. For a four person race, there’s (I think!) 65 combinations, but even that is manageable on a printout, though I think it may be reducible to 40 without ambiguity. Certainly manageable.
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p>In Canada they count votes (first past the post) by hand. They finish within a few hours. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing.
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p>
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p>That’s off the top of my head. With electronics, it’s not hard to scale.
IRV got the wrong answer in 2009 Burlington, VT Mayoral election
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p>More on IRV’s flaws here:
http://bolson.org/voting/irv/
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p>Condorcet’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have horrible glaring flaws like IRV.
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p>Aside from choice of election method, I agree that we need more democracy not less. Term limits say who you can’t vote for, no matter how much you might want to. That sucks.
Vote for as many candidates as you want (or rate them on a scale in the case of range voting), and whoever gets the most votes (or highest average score) wins.
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p>It’s relatively unique in its ability to simultaneously assure that voting for a candidate can’t hurt them while also assuring that it’s not possible for a candidate to “steal votes” from another candidate. But yeah, as that website says, it’s still better than IRV.
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p>(Which doesn’t violate arrow’s impossibility theorem because it’s not actually based on preferences, but on the degree of preference. Although because it doesn’t take into account the full set of preferences it doesn’t necessarily guarantee the Condorcet candidate will win.)
Look, no method is perfect. Condorcet requires pairwise comparisons, a complex input system, and can have circular results.
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p>IRV is much better than what we have now, is easy to explain, and easy to implement.
cycles are rare and easy to resolve.
I find your counter arguments dumb or ill-informed.
Only term linits we have is the Presidency. How has that worked out?
Truman, exempt. didn’t want to run again in ’52.
Eisenhower. Too old in ’60. Didn’t run.
Kennedy. 11/22/63
Johnson. Vietnam
Nixon. Watergate
Ford. Defeated by Carter
Carter. Defeated by Reagan
Reagan. Well, conservatives would have liked him to run again, but I don’t think it would of happened.
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p>Bush I. defeated by Clinton. It was the economy, stupid.
Clinton. Very interesting. No term limits probably would of run again and would have been President for 9/11. Things might have worked out differently. Would he still be President today? Would of depended upon the aftermath of 9/11. My speculation is he would of stepped down or been defeated in 2004.
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p>Bush II. Would of been defeated 2008.
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p>Obama. ???????
you can’t change the rules and expect the players to behave the same. If you know you’re up against a term limit, you behave differently precisely because you won’t be running for re-election.
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p>Likewise, in the primary, you might be less likely to play nice and be a VP candidate knowing that the POTUS might make it a lifetime appointment for himself.
Not sure. Likewise, Bush II’s defeat in 2008 uncertain. He had already committed his most glaring errors and sins by the election of 2004, yet he won anyway, right? With the prospect of possible reelection before him in 2008, Cheney would likely have redoubled his “warnings” about the dire consequences of voting for a Democrat in Wartime, the challenger would probably not have collected as much money, Rove would have been up to his usual tricks, and we’d perhaps have invaded Iran by now.
Not sure what any of this means, except perhaps that in 2008 term limits may very well have saved us from ourselves and/or from the power of incumbency.
I think the voters should decide whether someone gets 1, 2, 3 terms, or 47 years. I want the right to vote for someone as long as I think they are doing a good job.
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p>The power of incumbency is a real problem. But that problem has several causes:
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p>1. the power of money, and the power of incumbency to raise money
2. redistricting that locks in incumbents
3. the decline of two party politics in much of the country, which limits any challenges to – much harder – primary elections
4. decreasing voter turnout and interest
5. the perception that government is “bad” and anybody who runs for office is a political hack. Not an enticement for those “public service” minded folks to run for office.
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p>I don’t think term limits helps with most of these issues. It doesn’t, for example, reduce the power of money. (I also think term limits risk making things even more corrupt by shifting power to lobbyists; who will have the institutional memory, and jobs for term limited pols.) It doesn’t change the decline in two party politics. I don’t see how it improves voter turnout.
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p>I remember when Massachusetts in general, and Boston in particular, had much more competitive politics, and more effective government. I lived in Allston-Brighton in the 80’s, we had a battle every year: councilor, school committee, state rep, state senate, something.
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p>Without term limits.
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p>It would be nice to get some actual information on the effect of term limits on political competitiveness and competence. The Presidential example isn’t valid because we had 150 years of voluntary term limits before FDR. Some hard data from states that term limit legislators and/or constitutional officers, or cities that term limit mayors.
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p>Incumbents are getting re-elected by us. We should be willing face our responsibilities and vote ’em out when we feel their time has come. We get the government we deserve.
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p>Just my $0.02 musings.
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p>
Less so 4 & 5, I’m not sure interest is diminishing, so much as the value of getting involved in making real change is accurately perceived as not making a whole lot of difference.
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p>Anyway, here’s a report that gets at some of what you’re looking for. I’ve seen some other research, but didn’t have it on hand that suggests term limits decrease contested elections as potential candidates wait for terms to expire.
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p>Campaign finance reform would fix this, that’s the good government reform we really need.
I’m always suspicious of reactive policy. And let’s be clear — the term limits proposal is a reaction by City Council, a way to get something they couldn’t get at the ballot box. It’s a way to get rid of Menino…if he hadn’t just cruised to a record fourth re-election this wouldn’t have come up.
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p>This is an anti-Menino law, pushed by anti-Menino people. After Menino is gone, we’ll be stuck with the law. That’s a bad way to make policy.
The term limits proposal has been around for many years and is not a creation of Yoon/Flaherty.
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p>Maura Hennigan was the first to introduce the idea in this Century, back in 2005. Since she was running against Menino, it was widely dismissed as “reactive policy” by “anti-Menino people”.
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p>Then we had the sleepy 2007 City elections, where the at-large preliminary election drew only 9 candidates and was cancelled, disappointing very few outside the Arroyo camp. That election saw almost no competition in any race and the worst voter turnout in years.
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p>What do we do to increase interest? Councilor John Tobin proposes term limits in late November 2007.
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p>To be clear, I oppose term limits. Also, naturally, you are right that Menino’s long and seemingly endless reign has revived many folk’s interest in the idea.
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p>But it is unfair to characterize Yoon/Flaherty as sore losers for following through on a campaign promise to make an effort to pass what many believe is a reasonable good government reform. They were neither the first nor will they be the last.
You claim that the term limit proposal is not an anti-Menino law because Maura Hennigan proposed it first in 2005 when she was running against Menino? That makes no sense. Yes different people were pushing the idea, but in both cases they were trying to knock out an incumbent whose seat they coveted.
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p>I sure am not hearing anyone in the City Council calling for term limits for councilors.
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p>If we are going to have limits for the Mayor we should have the same limits for City Councilors as well.
Actually, several councilors have been calling for limits for themselves as well. In the recent hearings and the meeting this week, both John Connolly (at-large) and John Tobin (WR/JP), spoke for term limits for all our city’s elected officials. Six councilors voted for an amendment to limit council terms, with seven voting against.
No, I didn’t claim that at all. In fact, I acknowledged that Menino is the understandable face of the most recent Boston term limits advocacy.
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p>But this is not new! This is not sour grapes by Floon or simply campaign tactics. Term limits have been around as an idea since at least the beginning of the country. And the issue arises again in most elections:
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p>
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p>No incumbent being “knocked off” in 1993.
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p>P.S. More on Councilor’s term limits: The idea of term limits for folks who run mostly in small neighborhoods every two years is less appealing then for other offices. Nevertheless, Tobin has called for term limits to City Councilors since 2007. This year, Councilor Connelly introduced an amendment to impose term limits (six two-year terms) on all the Boston City Councilors.
There were also some rumbles about making councilor term limits more sensible by also increasing the term to two years instead of four. In that way, councilors wouldn’t have to spend so much time and effort constantly preparing for an election. In theory at least, they could do their constituent services and legislative work better like that.
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p>I liked that twist on it.
That would be increasing terms to four years from two. (Sorry.)
Term limits have been around for decades…and suddenly they’re on the cusp of adoption. Yet the fact that Menino regularly pastes some City Councilor or two every election has nothing to do with it…
…though I’m generally an anti-limits person myself, Menino and his machine (certainly not unique among large city mayors) tests my patience with that position. Maybe there is something to be said for executive, but not legislative limits.
This conviction that Menino wins because of a machine doesn’t square with the fact that he pasted his opponent in almost every precinct of the city. It doesn’t square with the fact that he does particularly well in areas with new immigrants who haven’t had time to join the machine.
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p>Menino won because he hustles like a madman…remember that poll that about half of all Bostonians aver that they’ve met the mayor personally? Meanwhile, the city councillors run by playing to the media and a small coterie of vocal Bay Staters who sometimes think Menino and Curley must be the same guy because they have the same longevity. If Flaherty had actually cut down on his time with the Globe and hustled in the neighborhoods, he would’ve had a shot.
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p>Menino’s just really good and capturing the support of people…that’s supposed to be a plus.
but w.r.t.
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p>
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p>Some would argue that a machine is particularly adept for snatching up new immigrants — who have a myopic view of the city, a narrow set of needs, and a small group of people influencing them.
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p>Why is this a bad argument, never mind the “worst” that anti-term limits people bring up? It’s undeniable that term limits restricts voter choice. Whether the benefits of doing so outweighs the negatives is what’s at question.
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p>
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p>Sure enough, we can pretty much see how this has worked out in reality, since many state offices across the country (including Governors, state Senates, etc.) have term limits. Did that limit the earmarks from state government to local governments? Did term-limited state Senators and Reps. continue in public service to gain “sharper minds, rested emotions, and clarified visions”? If the answer to both is “no”, why would term limits on the US Senate (or city councilors/mayors) work any differently?
Ah, but what the pro-limits guys present is much more convincing. Incumbency, accumulated power and cash, and support by interest groups far, far too often ensure re-election. Incumbents have to be really politically or personally clumsy to lose (or as in cases like the elder Felix Arroyo just not bother to show up during campaigns).
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p>There’s the throttle on both voter interest and candidacy.
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p>It is too literal to say term limits restrict democracy. In contrast to the present system, we see what really restricts voter choice.
Several Mayors in Massachusetts lost in primary or final municipal elections in 2009. None of these cities had term limits. The voters use their ballots to impose limits themselves rather than have a small group of elected officials define who is eligible to be elected.
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p>Lawrence has term limits on its Mayor and I challenge anyone to provide documentation on Lawrence being the hotbead of new faces and fresh ideas because voters choices are limited by an arbitrary number of terms.