Imitation Democracy. I received a sample ballot for school elections in my city, Newark, NJ, thru the mail last week. It consists of 11 names and the instruction “VOTE FOR THREE” “MEMBERS OF THE ADVISORY BOARD”. What is the Advisory Board, and what does it do? Does it have any real power, or is all power over educational decisions in the hands of a schools chancellor or superintendent, or even the Mayor? I haven’t a clue.
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On what basis am I to vote? No information whatsoever about these people accompanied the sample ballot: no bio, no statement of principles or campaign promises; nothing. Indeed, I am only assuming these names represent people. For all the voter knows, they could be goats or rhinoceruses (protest parties in various countries have in fact run animals for office).
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No party affiliation is shown. Nor an address for any of them, so I can’t even balance my choices by section of the city to be represented. Is even one of them from my neighborhood, Vailsburg?
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The sample ballot shows no slates of candidates, as would reveal interrelationships between these meaningless names: Progressive Ticket, New Age Thinkers, Back-to-Basics Slate. I haven’t received so much as one piece of mail about any of the named candidates.
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I have no time to read newspapers, and I watch little local news on television. My clock radio is set to WINS, a New York radio station that gives scant attention to New Jersey generally or Newark in particular. The non-national news I do occasionally watch, cable’s News12 New Jersey, claims to be “as local as local news gets” (even tho it covers the entire State of New Jersey and “News from beyond New Jersey”), but I haven’t seen anything at all about Newark’s school elections, much less a methodical, comprehensive examination of the differences among candidates.
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Like many people nowadays, I get most of my news from the Internet and national news programs. I just did a search on Google for “newark new jersey school elections 2004", and only after ten minutes of searching thru results and online articles did I finally find something in our local newspaper, the Star-Ledger, about the election. Three candidates of the 11 showed up at a public forum at which 10 spectators appeared! This is democracy?
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The article went on to point out that there are two slates, of three candidates each, the “Daddy Cares” ticket and the “For Our Kids” ticket, and speaks briefly about each group’s purposes. The article also speaks very briefly about three independent candidates not part of any slate, and says that the two remaining independent candidates didn’t even reply to calls from the Star-Ledger!
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After putting myself out, I have the barest of information on which to base my vote Tuesday — and will vote for the "Daddy Cares" slate, because they want to involve men more in the lives of their children and their schools: Omar Nieves, Patrick Council, and Leonard Wheeler. But for all I know, they are also fundamentalist Christian, anti-gay fanatics with whom I disagree on every other issue!
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This is no way to run an election. Individual voters should not have to take time from their busy lives to go out of their way to find information about candidates, and know that they still know almost nothing, certainly not enuf to make wise choices.
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In a democracy, information should come to the voter, thru the mail or mass media. Or a single, central repository of impartial information should be established on the Internet and be widely publicized, e.g., newarknjboardofelections.gov (doesn’t exist; I just tried), where candidates file information they swear, under penalty of perjury, to be true to the best of their information and belief, and make promises they expect to be held to.
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The present system is not democracy, but a sham: an imitation and travesty of democracy. It’s worse than student council elections in high school. Those elections are popularity contests but at least you knew who those kids were. I had never heard of any of these people. I don’t even know how one of the surnames is pronounced: “Ndiaye”. From the information I was sent, the most I can tell about any of them is that those with Spanish names are probably Hispanic! Is “Seelinger” white? Jewish? Well, he’s got “Jr.” at the end of his name, and at least Orthodox Jews don’t generally name a child after his father or any living relative -- however, if the father died after the child was conceived but before he was born, he could be a “Jr.”, I suppose.
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City Council elections in Newark are little or no better than these sham school board elections, because they too are nonpartisan. At least with a party, you have some idea of where people stand philosophically. Perhaps Newark is so preponderantly Democratic that no Republican would stand a chance if he ran with that party identification. Or would s/he, as a stark break from the past? Are Portuguese immigrants in the Ironbound natural Democrats?
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“Elections” in which voters are expected to vote without any information whatsoever are not real choices at all. They are meaningless, offenses to the principle that an informed electorate can make informed choices. So how do we reform Newark’s elections, and other such useless, worthless ‘elections’ that may actually be worse than no elections at all?
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When I lived in New York City, I voted in another useless election, for judges. In judicial elections, it is routine that multiple parties endorse the same person, which should be utterly forbidden, for it renders ostensibly partisan elections into the same useless, nonpartisan, nonchoice ‘elections’. I voted blindly, and learned only afterward that the nice WASP-y named “Bruce Wright” turned out to be “Turn ‘em Loose Bruce”, a black judge notorious for leniency and siding with criminals over victims!
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We have got to restore meaning to local elections.
— All elections should be partisan. What are parties for if not to give us guidance as to the principles of candidates? Party identification and/or slate identification should be shown on every ballot.
— A sworn statement from all candidates should be distributed to the voters, preferably by mail in a single brochure, but at least thru a single, centrally located and well-publicized website run by the Board of Elections and monitored by organizations such as the League of Women Voters.
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But perhaps we need more.
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There are a host of ‘elections’ most people don’t want to bother with, for offices we don’t care about or in subject-matter areas in which we feel we have insufficient expertise to make wise decisions, such as the qualifications of judges. Perhaps we need a new institution, an intermediary between the electorate in general and candidates for these minor or specialized offices: a standing electoral college.
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How this would work is, we create a Local Electoral College, a voters' panel that will do, for us, all voting for minor offices. We, the general electorate, would just vote for our local representative. We’d set a target like one Local Electoral College member per 1,000 residents, and vote, in elections in which candidates are identified by party and/or slate, for our particular own member of the Local Electoral College.
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With only 1,000 people to have to reach, each candidate for a Local Electoral College could be assured a good chance of meeting every single constituent, and every constituent would be confident that s/he could look the candidate in the eye, talk about the issues that concern him or her, and get a real sense of who that candidate is and where s/he stands.
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Then, for the next two years, the Local Electoral College would vote for all the minor offices, and EVERY office would be up for election by the Local Electoral College. Every school board member, the schools superintendent, every department head, every judge, every trustee of every public corporation and agency (from the Water Department to, here, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) would have to run for office, and if defeated by the Local Electoral College, would be turned out.
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Major offices — mayor, city councilmember, county executive, state assemblyman, state senator, Governor, federal Representative, federal Senator — would still be voted on by the general electorate directly.
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In this way we would broaden democracy by making every member of every public authority answerable to the electorate without requiring the electorate to go to the polls every month and vote blindly for people we know nothing about. We would vote for the guy or gal down the street, and if we had a bone to pick about someone they voted for in our name, we’d have their number and could explain, in person, why s/he mustn’t do that again!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:55 AM