Opinion: Boulder must focus on informing the electorate

 

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson once said.

Unfortunately, the current notion about shifting our city elections to even years will lead to exactly the opposite. Many people in Boulder invest a lot of time in national and state-level elections. To force them to spread themselves even thinner will just dumb down our local elections. And others don’t get enough information to make informed choices.

A perfect example of this dumbing down and information gap was the strange statement made by Councilmember Matt Benjamin, a member of the so-called progressives, “At the heart, it’s lifting up those that are disenfranchised and don’t vote in odd years.”

“Disenfranchise” means “deprive someone of the right to vote.” But every registered voter in Boulder County gets a ballot in both even and odd years. These can be filled out and returned by mail, or deposited in a drop-box, of which there are now seven in Boulder and one in Gunbarrel. All drop-boxes are open during every election, even and odd years alike. If dropping one’s ballot is too much of a burden, another voter can deliver 10 others’ ballots.

Given how easy it is to vote, the proper focus should be on ways to reach the Jeffersonian ideal of an “informed electorate,” so every citizen can make educated choices. Therefore, it’s critical to provide all residents with (1) adequate information so they can differentiate between candidates, and (2) enough time to absorb and process it. This is hard enough now; it would be much worse with the pressures of the long ballots of even-year voting.

This “informed electorate” goal might be consistent with Mayor Aaron Brockett’s comment, “When you make structural changes to make voting accessible to more people, you get that more representative electorate.” But that requires assuming that Brockett meant that information about candidates, not voting itself, needs to be more accessible and that voters have the time and energy to handle it. Here are some ideas to help accomplish that goal:

Websites: The city would make free web pages available to certified candidates up to an adequate size limit. These would be designed by the candidates’ teams; the city could also make free help available. The pages would be hosted by the city and located together so the candidates could be easily compared. This would also practically eliminate the threat of fake websites, such as occurred last election.

Direct Mail: The city could do a direct mailer to all voting households. Candidates would each be able to include one 8.5”x11” insert of their own design. In addition, citizen groups meeting some standard (e.g. general participation in their organization and limits on contribution size) could include their own inserts providing their evaluations of the candidates.

These two ideas would put candidates on a more equal footing and thereby reduce the power of the “slate” process, which already undermines the city rules against candidate coordination.

Debate Site: The motivation for this comes from the current burdensome process where multiple groups send detailed questionnaires to candidates that are lengthy and time-consuming to fill out and really don’t illuminate anyone but the groups’ members. The groups would send representatives to a meeting and hammer out, say, 20 questions that cover most everyone’s most important issues. The candidates would then answer them, up to some reasonable word-limit. The city would post (and direct mail) the results, but organized by question, so the voters could compare candidate’s responses. I expect that these would be very well read.

The city could cover most of these costs, perhaps deducting part of the matching funds and only making these sites available to candidates that agree to the city’s campaign contribution and expenditure limits. Obviously, voters processing all this info takes time and energy, so odd-year elections become even more important!

Regarding the mayoral election, Boulder’s mayor basically runs the meetings and helps organize the agenda. Thus, having the council select the mayor makes much more sense to me. But if we are to have direct elections of the mayor, then the council owes it to the citizens to give us a chance to select Approval Voting (AV) over Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Approval Voting (voting for all the mayoral candidates you “approve” of) works with the current ballot design and software, so it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars less than RCV. And unlike RCV, AV does not lead to suboptimal, polarized results.

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