Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Voting

  • Voting with a Single Candidate

    Not many years ago, if you were faced with a cluster of unacceptable clowns on your ballot, you could write a name in and cast a protest vote.  Hell, I guess you still can – the thing is, your write-in protest vote won’t be counted or reported.  With the elimination of subsection 7 last year, the last remaining method of voting against an unopposed, unacceptable candidate was taken away.

    Time was when we laughed about unopposed Soviet candidates being elected with no votes for the opponent.  We’re at that same stage now.  When the next primary comes out, we’ll be faced with a bunch of zero choice positions.

    P.J. O’Rourke wrote “Don’t Vote – It Only Encourages the Bastards.”  He may have been Prescient.  Our current system mandates that, in order to run for office, you must pay filing fees based on this schedule:

    From How to run for office in Montana – Ballotpedia

    Filing fees
    Office soughtHow the fee is determined
    For offices earning an annual salary of $2,500 or less and members of the state legislature$15
    For offices (except county-level) earning an annual salary of more than $2,5001% of salary
    For offices in which compensation is paid in fees$10

    By keeping the filing fee at $15 for state legislature, they – it’s more polite than O’Rourke’s tag (The Bastards) state representatives and senators don’t have to face the fact that our filing fees keep a lot of people out of the running.

    Montana County Elected Official Salary Survey shows the salaries of elected officials in most Montana counties.  It’s a year old, but I don’t have any better source to cover the state.  In Lincoln County, you can get the current salaries here.

    Probably the most interest is for the County Commissioner at $64,232.94 – so the 1% filing fee is a bit higher than $642.  It’s the same for sheriff –  and the rest of the full-time elected positions are $62,232.94.  (This is the base salary, commissioners and sheriff get $2,000 more.

    We could go on to elected state positions – but that’s for a future issue.

    It’s expensive just to file for these positions.  Write-in votes are no longer counted . . . so it is no longer possible to vote against a single candidate that you find unacceptable.  If you vote for him or her, it only encourages the bastards.  Worse, it discourages the folks who might run against them.

    Since the bastards have made it impossible to vote against an unopposed and unacceptable candidate, they have made voting less effective.  Our elections are essentially the same as the Soviet system we once mocked.  Still, the bastards have left us an alternative, and it’s a simple exercise in Irish democracy:

    If a candidate is unopposed, don’t mark that part of the ballot.  The unopposed candidate is going to win the election – so make him or her or it win with the smallest number of votes possible.  It won’t be possible to make the courthouse clique candidates win with single digit numbers – I’ll get into the socially constructed reality of the courthouse and the annex later – but it would be a beautiful protest if the county treasurer or clerk won re-election with less than half of the ballots cast.  That would encourage the opposition.

    P.J. O’Rourke was right.  They have screwed with the elections so much that voting can only Encourage the Bastards.  He didn’t take it far enough – if enough of us leave the boxes next to the unopposed candidates unfilled, it will encourage opponents.  The first step in getting the vote back is remembering P.J. – Don’t Vote – It Only Encourages the Bastards.  But don’t forget to cast your ballot!

  • Does Each Solution Create a New Problem?

    It’s not a happy situation when a problem’s solution creates a new problem that is equal or greater than the original problem.  In Elementary school civics, I learned that the Secret Ballot was developed to solve the problem of political bosses ability to tell people how to vote, and punish people who voted against their candidates.  I was about 10 or 12, and I bought the idea – if someone was buying votes, you could take their money, go into the voting booth and vote against them, and nobody would ever know the difference.

    Later, I learned that the secret ballot had its own weakness – it depended on the honesty of the folks who count the ballots.  Before the secret ballot, everyone knew how I voted.  It made it harder to rig the election with a fake count.  I’m pretty sure that Stalin didn’t say “Those who cast the votes decide nothing.  Those who count the votes decide everything.”  But it’s a solid description of a problem resulting from the secret ballot.

    Easy absentee voting removes my need for a ten-mile round trip to vote – it’s a solution to that problem.  Still, in the past 6 months, we’ve seen two fubars here in the north end of Lincoln County.  The first fubar was the loss, misplacement, whatever of a box full of ballots that were left, lost, abandoned, whatever, in Eureka instead of being delivered to Libby for the count.  I use the term fubar – the official news release included the descriptor “impeccable” and pardoned the error with the thought that his heart was in the right place.  The obvious question is whether or not the hiring process is stringent enough.  A less obvious question is whether or not the county functions to provide fair and competent services – Koocanusa did a good job of cutting the middle from the county.

    The most recent problem with absentee voting was two-fold.  First unsolicited absentee ballots were sent out to protect folks from disease.  Second, a simple blunder included two districts in the mailing that didn’t include eligible voters.  The initial response to my question about it was credited to the election administrator and reads “All I can tell you is that their address is in both the Eureka School District 13 and the Trego district 53. They can legally vote for District 13.”

    The official release, when the blunder was recognized, is a bit different – but, hell, I was there to bring the problem in the open. 

    I didn’t bother looking at the possibility of fraudulent counts being enhanced by loose absentee ballot controls.  Jimmy Carter already made that determination – and I did cast my secret ballot for him back in 1976.  Still like the man – though I thought that only Buchanan kept him from being the worst president ever.  But that was back in the 20th century – in the 21st both Carter and Buchanan have had some stiff competition.