Woonsocket elections and a good read…
I have mixed feelings about the Governor’s cost saving measure as proposed in his version of the FY2010 budget–he’d save roughly $55k by forcing Woonsocket (along with two other communities that do municipal elections in the odd-years) to hold all elections in even years or pay the expense of odd-year elections.
I like the idea of having everything on one ballot in the even years. The feedback that I’ve heard from friends on the municipal side are that too many names on the ballot in the even years would be a detriment to those on the low end of the ballot, specifically the large fields for City Council and School Committee. So the tradeoff, as described to me, is that while voter turnout may be lower in the odd years, the people that show up to vote are able to be better informed about the individuals running for Mayor, City Council, and School Committee. I think that it would pay dividends in the form of increased turnout to do it all in one fell swoop.
That being said, I’d like the City of Woonsocket to come to their own conclusion (voters through a ballot referendum, or City Council) as to how we run our elections. Needless to say, I do not support the idea of this being forced upon us. I guess that puts me in a unique position of potentially having to vote against something that I agree with in principle due to my disagreement with the process.
Jim Baron has a good article on this issue in today’s Woonsocket Call.
“This should never see the light of day,” an angry James Allam, chairman of the Woonsocket Board of Canvassers, said. “Reasonable people would not pursue that.”
“It wouldn’t affect the Board of Canvassers, it would affect the finances of the city,” Allam continued. “We don’t have money in the budget to pay the (state) anything for our elections. This is just a way of passing the buck onto communities, indirectly increasing local tax rates.”
He said the state should have asked communities to explore the idea of even-year elections instead of simply moving to pass on the costs.
I’d love some feedback on this issue.
From a more esoteric position, Real Clear Politics is a political site that does a phenomenal job of covering national politics from all different perspectives–basically they just link to the major political pieces of the day. Today they have a fantastic synopsis of some of the structural excuses as to why Democrats tend to fail in pushing an agenda when they have a lopsided control of the Congress:
The Democrats’ problems aren’t limited to Carter and Clinton. They have historically had a less ideologically unified coalition than the Republicans. This is why the agenda of the Democratic party has largely remained both unchanged and unfulfilled since Roosevelt’s 1941 Message to Congress, notwithstanding the general Democratic dominance of the period.
The whole article is worth reading. Sometime, I’d like to see a similar analysis applied to Rhode Island, particularly the General Assembly.
