Tag Archives: politics

A History of Georgia’s Party Primary Ballot questions

Politics, , ,

I’m writing this post to document the history of the limited access to direct democracy in the U.S. state of Georgia, and especially about the potential small-d democratic opportunities which can be used to advise city, county and state legislators. For reference, here is a Google Drive folder of all the party advisory questions placed on the ballot in Georgia at state and county levels since 2000 (ongoing at the moment).

History of direct democracy in Georgia

Georgia mostly missed the boat, or rather, the tide of the initiative & referendum movement which took more westward states by storm in the late 19th-early 20th century. From 1911-1913, the General Assembly moved to extend initiative, referendum and recall rights to the residents of four cities, including Atlanta. The first ballot measures for legislatively-referred constitutional amendments took place in 1924. The first amendments to be rejected at the ballot were five out of 13 proposed amendments on the November 4, 1930 ballot. The most recent proposed amendments to fail at the ballot was Amendment 1 on the November 8, 2016 ballot, which would have established the so-called “Opportunity School District” as a statewide at-large school district over public schools deemed “chronically failing”.

In addition, county and city governments can place questions on the ballot for all voters, and can choose a date. Counties can place a question on the ballot (whether in the nonpartisan section of a primary ballot, or on the general election ballot) by one of the following means:

  • county commissioners voting to place the question on the ballot
  • citizens gathering a required number of petition signatures to amend (or veto changes to) local ordinances, resolutions, and regulations.

Either option requires a majority of the city or county’s delegation in the General Assembly to file a bill in support of the referendum, and for the General Assembly to approve the bill.

In addition, there is a third way to put a question on the ballot, one which is advisory in most ways but can have an indirect, motivating impact on legislation.

Party Advisory Questions on Primary Ballots

Around April 1997, a law allowing for parties to place advisory questions on the primary ballot was passed by the General Assembly, making Georgia only one of three states to allow parties’ chairs to place questions on primary ballots (alongside Texas and South Carolina). In 2000, the Richmond County Republican Party became the first recorded county party to use this law to place a question on the primary ballot, doing so with 6 questions that year. The practice increased across many counties over the next five primaries, and in 2012 questions were placed for the first time on statewide primary ballots, with both the Democratic Party of Georgia placing 4 questions and the Georgia Republican Party placing 5.

On a few occasions in a few counties, both parties have placed the same question on the ballot, including Rockdale in 2012 and Pickens in 2018, both of which were related to the form of government to be taken by the county government. To date, no statewide primary ballot has had both parties place the question on the same ballot.

Due to the way that such polls are written, they’re usually fluffy questions which do not deviate from the party’s already-established platform. The few times that a question is fielded from outside of party orthodoxy is usually intended to gin up primary voter opposition to the question.

Marijuana/Cannabis on the Georgia Ballot

Only a few good-faith questions which deviate from party orthodoxy have been fielded by county parties, such as Henry County Republicans’ 2020 Question 4, asking Republican voters whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed to the same extent as alcohol. Republican voters approved this question 9,849 to 9,415 (51.13%-48.87%). However, in 2018, two similar questions (one asking whether medical marijuana should be legalized, and another asking the same for recreational marijuana) provided a more complicated picture among Republican voters in multiple, largely-rural counties, with 6 counties’ Republican primaries registering lopsided support for medical marijuana but the same voters in 3 of those counties registering lopsided opposition to recreational marijuana (those being the only counties which polled Republicans on recreational marijuana that year).

By comparison, marijuana has been on at least one county’s Democratic ballot every year since 2014, all winning lopsidedly at the polls:

  • Cherokee and Whitfield Dems on recreational, Richmond Dems on medical (2014)
  • Catoosa Dems on medical marijuana (2016)
  • Forsyth and Glynn Dems on recreational (2018)
  • Forsyth and Walton Dems for recreational (2020)

How to capitalize on advisory questions

I think that party advisory questions, while incredibly flawed in only being placed by party leaders on separate primary ballots, offer an opportunity for massive polling of the primary-voting public on issues, not only for well-established party platforms but also for newer ideas which have yet to be incorporated into party platforms. In addition, polling of the primary-voting public through advisory questions can offer glimpses into regional divides, nuances and knowledge about newer ideas.

For example, Cobb4Transit’s post on the results of two 2020 Democratic advisory questions in Cobb County – Question 7 on a one-center sales tax for transit funding, and Question 8 on MARTA expansion into Cobb – provides an in-depth look at the nuances of support for these positions on the Democratic side in Cobb County.

A 2020 Republican statewide question (Republican Question 2), which called for establishing closed party primaries to determine primary winners, failed by 1-2%. The data shows that the idea has support among Republicans in northern and coastal Georgia, with the greatest opposition coming from western, middle and southern Georgia Republicans. A similar question was asked to South Carolina Republicans in the 2018 and 2020 primaries, receiving 92.30% and 86.47% respectively.

I expect marijuana legalization to be on the Democratic statewide party primary ballot in 2022. It may be the biggest question that the Democratic Party of Georgia hasn’t yet asked on the statewide ballot, after a near decade of asking primary voters their position on already-settled party positions such as Medicaid expansion, expanding HOPE access and gun control.

Similarly, for LGBT civil rights activists, Whitfield’s 2014 Democratic Question 6 and Cobb’s 2020 Democratic Question 11, both of which asked voters whether their county should pass a non-discrimination law covering sexual orientation and gender identity (Cobb’s listed more categories), received resounding endorsements, winning 75.58% in Whitfield and 97.41% in Cobb. This is another question that the DPG State Chair should be encouraged to ask to Democrats statewide, in regards to the proposed Georgia Civil Rights Act.

But finally, more county commissions should be encouraged to follow Wisconsin’s example in placing advisory questions on the November general election ballot.



An End to American Exceptionalism

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

So….

That happened.

I hope this is an end to American exceptionalism. I hope it’s an end to the idea that we could never have a(n auto)coup attempt against the U.S. government take place, that we’re not built like that.

Numerous people around the world can tell first-hand about how things went when a coup or coup attempt took place, when the constitutional order was seized and abrogated, when the reset button was pressed, when the machine was unplugged because someone felt it was acting too buggy.

This is the first time that someone tried to abrogate the constitutional order of the United States, and it unfortunately was the fascist side which made this attempt. And it is pretty damn symbolic that only 24 hours earlier, Georgia voters played by the same damn rules which had been decried for giving Biden the win in November and gave a giant L to two Republican Senators. Yet, such an event as happened on Tuesday was not on the front pages of the struggling newspaper industry on Wednesday.

And now we see how buggy and limited in functionality the constitutional order is when it comes to responding to such an incident as what happened Wednesday, as well as our current chronic inability to fix the limitations of the 25th Amendment. We’re likely not going to see it invoked before January 20th.

But yet, we’re forced to live with the garbage structure of the 1787 Constitution, because we’re scared of how people who decided to flex their perceived privilege and assault police inside the Capitol building and are now in various levels of dispersion from scrutiny are more than willing to kill people and avoid consequences in the attempt to seize power.

I fear impunity. They may get away with it, Congress may do nothing, and we’ll be effectively living under a different set of rules than what applies to Trump and his shitty supporters, even after he leaves office.

And we also won’t be exceptional in that regard. After all, despite her family’s crimes in office (including her husband, “our man in Manila” who we effectively rescued from the consequences of his actions), Imelda Marcos was allowed to come back and serve in the Philippine Congress twice.

(Fun fact: Mom was living in Clark AFB, and still remembers the curfew enforced on the base the night that the Marcos family fled Malacañang Palace 83 km north to Clark AFB, where they spent two days and then flew to Guam, then to Hawaii. I was born in California almost a year after the People Power Revolution.)

Script Idea for Ossoff/Warnock

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Please make this a script idea for a joint #OssoffWarnock ad:

Ossoff and Warnock walk along forked paths in a park which converges to a point.
Ossoff: “We believe the American people deserve more money from federal COVID relief.”
Warnock: “But Senate Republicans think that only $600 are good enough for you, even when Donald Trump and Joe Biden say it ain’t!”
Ossoff knocks over standee of Perdue: “David Perdue says no to $2000”
Warnock knocks over standee of Loeffler: “Kelly Loeffler ALSO says no to $2000”
Ossoff and Warnock stop at the fork.
Ossoff: “You know who will say yes to $2000?”
Ossoff/Warnock fist bump each other, saying together: “We will!”
Warnock: “We will vote for it”
Harris: “I will break the tie”
Schumer and Pelosi together: “We will pass it”
Biden: “And I will sign it”
Ossoff: “But none of this happens unless you vote to send us to the Senate by January 5th”
Warnock: “Vote for Ossoff and Warnock in the runoff so we can-“
Biden: “Run”
Harris: “You”
Schumer/Pelosi: “Your”
Ossoff/Warnock: “Money!”
Ossoff: “I’m Jon Ossoff”
Warnock: “I’m Raphael Warnock”
Ossoff/Warnock: “And we approve this message”

We Can Have National “Referendums” in America

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

Thinking about how the 2017 Australian Marriage Referendum was carried out, besides the impact it had on LGBT mental health (like these sorts of referenda so often have). But officially, it was not a referendum: it was carried out by the federal government entirely by mail, it did not have the force of law, was not subject to Australia’s mandatory voting law, and did not need enabling legislation to be conducted. Yet, the federal government in Australia did make use of Australia’s national voter database to send the survey out, and a deadline was selected for citizens to register to vote in order to participate.

Technically, the United States federal government could carry out a national postal survey, mostly bypassing the states. However, it would have to be carried out with voter rolls purchased from the states.

Currently, besides the consultations carried out by federal agencies as required prior to approving or rescinding a rule, the only existing federal attempt at direct democracy is the “We the People” petition site. I wonder if the Biden admin will improve on this site or let it languish as it has.

  1. It only requires that someone create a whitehouseDOTgov account in order to create a petition, and it doesn’t even require one to be signed in in order to sign a petition. Signers should be signed-in first.
  2. There is no verification of identity in order to create an account. I’d tie it to one’s social security number and that one be a registered voter in one’s state in order to create an account.
  3. The only response that could currently be asked for is a statement from someone in the White House if it reaches 100k signatures in 30 days. If it were to reach 1 million signatures within, say, 60 days, a higher response should be required. And if a certain threshold of signatures were reached, such as 8% of popular vote turnout in the last presidential election, a national non-binding postal survey on the petition question should be triggered.
  4. Require two-factor authentication for accounts.

Facts about the Georgia PSC runoff

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Facts about the PSC runoff:

  • The GOP has won all six runoffs for PSC since the first runoff in 1992 (Democrat John Frank Collins v. Republican Bobby Baker).
  • The challenge for Daniel Blackman, as it was for Lindy Miller in 2018, has been to both ride the coattails of the marquee runoffs and also emerge from their shadow as an important statewide race at the same time.
  • Only twice – 1998 (special) and 2006 – has there been a PSC runoff as the only partisan runoff on the ballot.
  • The frequency of PSCs runoffs tracks closely with the slow rurally-driven collapse from 1992 to 2010 and the (sub)urban-driven re-emergence since 2018 of Georgia Democrats as a serious party intent on fighting for power.
  • There is no national 527 or PAC organization of Democrats dedicated to organizing fundraising and campaign ads for PSCs in the same way that there is for Democratic candidates for governor (DGA), secretary of state (DASS) and attorney-general (DAGA), at least not in the 11 states which hold partisan PSC elections.
  • Blackman and McDonald’s percentage in November track closely with Miller and Eaton’s initial percentage in November 2018.
  • Blackman would be only the second African American on the body in its history, following David Burgess who was defeated in his only re-election bid in 2006 by Chuck Eaton.
  • Despite Blackman having went up against McDonald once before in 2014 (a dismal year for Democrats at all levels), this runoff promises to be a lot closer in the final percentage.

Runoff Elections in Georgia are Racist

Politics, Uncategorized,

Think about it:

  1. the county unit system, combined with the white primary until 1945, was racist and biased against urban voters.
  2. when the county unit system was struck down in 1963, the beneficiaries of the county unit system in the General Assembly voted to switch to runoff voting for future elections in order to prevent “Negroes” from “bloc voting” by allowing white voters to vote as a “bloc” in the second round.
  3. when Wyche Fowler was defeated in a runoff by Paul Coverdell in 1992, the Democrats in the General Assembly voted to switch to plurality voting, only triggering a runoff if the winning candidate received 45% in the first round. The rural voters continued to bleed to the GOP, who restored the runoff requirement when they took the General Assembly in 2005.
  4. the number of runoffs statewide has increased as the two parties have realigned and the Atlanta ring has widened, from one each in 2006 (PSC) and 2008 (Senate) to two in 2018 (SoS and PSC) to three in 2020 (two Senate, 1 PSC).

So how many December-January runoffs are we going to have in 2022? And how are we supposed to excuse the baldly-racist justification of the runoff system?

The Department of the Interior as a Department of Environment and Climate Protection

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Reading this article from Vox about why the incoming Biden administration should establish a Department of Climate, the only times it goes into specifics about what this proposed department should look like is when it mentions current gaps in environmental justice, as well as how the Department of Homeland Security was cribbed from agencies in various departments.

If anything, the Department of the Interior, which has been so gutted of agencies over the last century that it has been called “the Department of Everything Else” and currently only manages federal lands and Native American affairs, would be a good candidate for serving as a Department of Environment and Climate.

All it needs is:

  1. a reshuffling of the NOAA from the Department of Commerce (for surveying the environment)
  2. the US Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service from the USDA (to conserve forests and natural resources)
  3. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from the Department of Energy (to support renewable energy, sustainable transportation and energy efficiency)
  4. the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences from HHS (for research into the effects of the environment on human disease)
  5. a (re-)merger of the EPA (for environmental assessment, research, education and regulation)
  6. Some permanent White House Initiatives on Environmental Justice for each ethnic minority community (African Americans, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, AAPI Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans)

If all of this (plus some) could be done, the DOI could become a powerful, holistic spearhead of federal climate and environmental policy.

Also: The Patent and Trademark Office should be moved to the DOJ, and the Census Bureau should be moved to HHS.

Winning the Senate is More Important than Anything

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I have voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and for Democrats down the ballot.

But when I did so, my enthusiasm was not focused on the top of the ticket. I’m learning to not fall in love with the top of the ticket, or to hold high expectations for what the president will do upon taking office.

Instead, I have high expectation from a Democratic majority Senate and House, and for President Biden to cooperate with this majority.

Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker, has set up some extremely high expectations in this 116th Congress for what the congressional agenda will be under the next Democratic trifecta. All of those bills that were passed by the Democratic House and blocked by the Republican Senate need to be passed again with a Democratic trifecta. And the Senate, under Schumer or whoever, absolutely needs to ditch the filibuster to make all of this happen.

Then I need this trifecta to try passing at least one (1) progressive constitutional amendment. There’s one that’s been waiting for over 40 years to become the 28th.

All I want from our 46th president is to sign all of those bills, take the credit and step out of the way. Don’t obstruct, don’t try to get in the way of the House.

That’s the only way I can get some sleep. The joke may be that we’re voting for “Sleepy Joe” so we can get some sleep, but I’m not resting (much) until the backlog of bills on McConnell’s desk is cleared into law in the 117th. I’m not resting until substantial federal COVID relief is passed. Not until a new VRA is passed, not until DC statehood is passed, not until the For the People Act, Equality Act, George Floyd Act, HR 40, Paycheck Fairness Act, SAFE Banking Act, Climate Action Now Act, and every other act passed by the 116th House gets sent to Joe Biden’s desk in the 117th. I look forward to the MORE Act, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, and other bills which didn’t get consideration by this Congress moving forward in the next.

That’s what I’m voting for, no matter what happens at/with the increasingly-deligitimized SCOTUS, no matter the rage of right-wing governors, attorneys-general and secretaries of state.

I’m glad that Biden will be going into office without the high expectations which were accorded to Obama from his election, and without the high drama which dogged Clinton throughout her campaign. He will be boring, and maybe opaque, and that’s good. Hopefully, he won’t have too many Executive Orders to issue.

The main focus must be paid to the Democratic Congress, and to whether they will fulfill their promises to the people.

The regional discrepancy in early vote turnout for 2020, and other observations

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Looking at the Elect Project’s map of early voting turnout up to this point, I spent a week wondering why the turnout in the Midwest and Pennsylvania (especially Pennsylvania) was so low compared to most of the “Sun Belt” states.

Apparently, I learned that this is the first year in which most of the Midwest, Pennsylvania and New York was introduced to both early voting and no-excuse absentee voting, but no-excuse absentee was introduced as the only means of early voting in several Midwestern states. Gerrymandered Republican state legislatures had incredible misgivings about no-excuse absentee throughout this election cycle.

That partly explains why pre-Election Day turnout in the Midwest, New York and Pennsylvania is lower than Georgia, Florida, North Carolina (All three of which use both absentee and and either paper ballots or machines for in-person for 3 weeks), Texas (which largely used paper or machines for 3 weeks of early in-person voting while shunning expansion of absentee voting to those with no excuse), and most states west of the Mississippi.

(At least Michigan prepared a bit better with the passage of Proposal 3 in the Blue Wave of 2018, which legalized no-excuse absentee voting among other reforms via ballot initiative as a constitutional amendment, which has meant that Republicans have found other means of nipping at absentee voting in Michigan such as cutting counting time to Election Day).

The Midwest needed no-excuse absentee in the first place. Michigan was more prepared for COVID forcing a greater reliance on absentee voting, but not the other Midwestern states. The early voting turnout in the Midwest was leaps and bounds ahead of their 2016 early voting turnout, which is to be praised. BUT this sudden and exclusive switch to no-excuse absentee voting was a mistake, IMO, at least when looking at states which did both in-person paper/machine voting and absentee voting and almost eclipsed their 2016 totals (like Georgia and Florida). This amounted to a trial-by-fire for election administrations who were more accustomed to voters turning out on Election Day in person. Absentee voting (and especially early voting) absolutely should be kept and expanded in the Midwest, but maybe they should be kept as an option for at least a few more elections before going total absentee like Colorado and four other states. Or maybe this method of reserving early voting for absentee ballots will improve in future cycles.

Thanks to this early turnout for absentee ballots in the Midwest, GOTV for Dems is going to be a heavier lift in the Midwest/PA/NY for Election Day (but a lot easier for Dems compared to 2016), while GOTV for Dems in the Sun Belt has the easier(?) but more complicated necessity to be more precise with who to pull to the polls, especially Black and Brown voters in Florida. The worries over Black and Brown turnout are easy fodder for the usual “Dems in disarray” headlines, even as Biden has led an otherwise stellar campaign.

And the growing consensus among the prognosticators and election mappers I read on Twitter is that North Carolina’s early count of absentee ballots (currently 97% counted) will likely point to the Electoral College winner on what is erroneously called “Election Night”.

On Ice Cube

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All of the 13 points from Ice Cube’s “Contract with Black America” rely on legislation, all of this is the responsibility of Congress, few of these will withstand scrutiny as mere executive orders, and few (if any) of these will pass a 60-vote majority in the Republican Senate.

Furthermore, as we’ve seen throughout the last 3 years, Trump does not control the Republican Senate (he may have been key to a few election wins for them, but he’s currently being kept at arms’ length). Trump’s “Platinum Plan” will not get 60 votes, and the Republican Senators are damn sure not repealing the filibuster.

Similarly, Biden will not control the Democratic Senate, and his only job will be to pass or veto whatever is sent to him by a Democratic Congress.

So Ice Cube can collaborate with Trump’s advisors to perfect the “Platinum Plan” all he wants. Doesn’t mean it’s going to Trump’s desk, or the CWBA to Biden’s, unless the filibuster goes away next year.

And Biden’s campaign was right to answer that this will have to wait until after the election. It’s Schumer who will have to answer that anyway, not Biden. Don’t write a check that you can’t cash from the White House.