I woke up today and as has been my wont for the past couple of weeks, checked the poll aggregators, pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com. Pollster had already removed Ohio from strongly leaning towards Obama to a battleground state, Obama was down from 311 to 294. Even though 294 seats is enough to win him the White House, I heart stopped for an instant. Even before the race has begun, we’re losing seats, I thought to myself. A Reuters headline said that Obama was leading McCain in five of the eight battleground states. I took some comfort in that. NYT is running a page which asks you to describe how you feel in a single word, you can come up with one of your own or select from one already chosen by some of the others. I picked jittery, though anxious and apprehensive would probably have been more precise.
US is one of the few countries in the world which has some form of direct democracy, allowing the voter to vote on locally relevant issues rather than just for one or more representatives. Some examples of the kinds of issues placed on the ballot include a statute to reduce the suffering of farm animals, a referendum to declare marriage as only between opposite sexes and putting an upper bound on the year-over-year property tax increases to prevent making it unaffordable for very old residents. An issue is packaged as an initiative, a referendum or a recall. Recalls are typically issued to recall a publicly elected official before his/her term is over. For example, in 2003, California recalled then Governor Gray Davis on grounds of mismanagement and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place. In the US, the modern form of initiative and referendum first originated in the state of South Dakota from where it spread to Oregon whose format is now the one practiced in much of the remaining states. Initiatives and referendums are issues initiated by the citizenry and when larger than a specified number of registered voters petition to have the issue placed on the year’s ballot. The initiative may force an amendment to the State constitution or merely require the executive and legislative bodies to seriously consider the results of the initiative in creating a new law. One recently famous example of an initiative passed in Oregon is the one allowing doctor assisted suicides. In California this year, probably the most important referendum is Proposition 8, a yes vote for which forces a state constitutional amendment to explicitly define marriage as between people of opposite sexes only. Overwhelmingly opposed by the valley companies such as Google and Apple, the measure looked like it was heading for a sound defeat, but has since picked up much momentum and now it appears to be a very close race.
Many ballot measures are requests to issue bonds to finance various projects. This year, in California, there are about 12 ballot proposals of which six are bond measures for proposals such as a high speed rail system between LA and San Francisco and money for children’s hospitals to money for encouraging alternative fuels. On top of this, we also have local county (similar to a district) measures such as a bond for extending a commuter rail line from East Bay to South Bay. So, as a voter I got two booklets totaling about 160 pages which included the entire text of each proposal, arguments for and against the proposal and some assessment of the impact of the proposal. Understanding all of this to vote in a sensible, educated manner is quite a lot of work. The list of proposals are presented in limerick form each time by some of the local educational groups, though they’re not entirely without bias. For example, here is the limerick for Proposition 8, the measure to ban gay marriage:
A San Francisco Mayor created some bedlam
When he stood before gay couples to wed ‘em
Although fundees scream “unclean!”
“Gay marriage is obscene!”
It’s the state’s job to register couples, not judge ‘em
And here is the one on the high speed rail bond:
In the mythical land of Califairia
The people evinced an unusual hysteria
They voted for prodigious debt
In a lunatic bet
That they could somehow live beyond their salaria
Sometimes the issues are so obscure that it is hard to understand the rationale behind the proposal. I picked a few that I thought that I understood and had a position on. The rest I voted based on the axiom of always reject bonds and copying the suggestions from a suggestion list that I got in the mail that matched my ideas on the ones that I cared about.
A body called IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) provides a lot of information about all the different issues and methods that underlie a democracy. For example, they have a detailed breakdown by country of where compulsory voting is practiced and the specific practices of compulsory voting in the country, they cover the very important issue of gender and democracy, the study voter turnout in different parts of the world and report their findings (there is no link between literacy and voter turnout, for example). They state that direct democracy is becoming popular the world over. A site worth checking out for a wealth of information.
I was checking some of the sites to see if any early results were available and found that pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com had a message saying that early results would not be forthcoming and also put up a FAQ on why exit polls are bad predictors of the eventual outcome. Sigh. Guess I have to continue my teeth gnashing for a little longer.
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