Thread: California politicans use power to fix the ballot game

Monday, Jan. 30, 2012 - 12:00
By Dan Walters
When a political party achieves dominance of any government, one expects that it would use its hegemony to enact its public policy agenda.
That's the way democracy is supposed to work.
Using dominance to change the political system with the aim of perpetuating control is another matter. It fixes the game and undermines democracy.
The most obvious example is redrawing legislative and congressional districts to ensure that particular parties or politicians will win subsequent elections, a practice called gerry- mandering that was common in California until voters created an independent redistricting commission.
Gerrymandering, however, is not the only way dominant politicians attempt to predetermine election outcomes.
Commonly, for example, the Legislature places measures on the ballot and dictates the precise ways they are described – words that often shade the truth about the measures' true effects to persuade voters to vote for something they might not otherwise enact.
That's fixing the game.
Last year, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and a Legislature controlled by his party decreed that all initiative and referendum ballot measures appear on the November ballot, rather than both the November and the June primary elections, the practice for the last four decades.
Why? Everyone knows that it was to diminish chances that voters would pass a so-called "paycheck protection" measure that would eat into unions' ability to gather campaign funds from public employees – money that almost always goes to Democrats.
Enacting a major change in election law to affect the outcome of one ballot measure is fixing the game.
The attorney general's office, in concert with the Legislature's budget analyst, is supposed to provide objective "titles and summaries" for measures that appear on the ballot. The latter agency does its work as it's supposed to, but in recent years, the attorney general has been giving descriptions positive or negative spins.
The latest examples, under Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris, are the very positive description of the Brown-sponsored tax- increase measure that unions support and the negative, and even misleading, way two proposed public pension initiatives that unions despise are described. One example: Using "teachers, nurses and peace officers" as examples of who would be affected, rather than garbage collectors or Department of Motor Vehicle clerks.
Harris' office defends the summaries and insists that political considerations were not involved, but the chosen words clearly make Brown's measure more palatable to voters and the pension- reform measures more onerous.
It's using political office to fix the game, and it undermines democracy.

Read more here: Dan Walters: California politicans use power to fix the ballot game - Sacramento Politics - California Politics | Sacramento Bee

We could add the counting of illegal immigrants on the census to the list of gerrymandering technics being used by our politicans to predetermine the outcome of our elections

Like Luis Gutierrez' district?