RESCUING VOTING FROM THE LONG BALLOT

By Earl M. Ryan, President, Citizens Research Council of Michigan

(Adapted from a presentation to the Ann Arbor Rotary Club, January 13, 1999)

While we at Citizens Research Council of Michigan are interested in public policy, we are also concerned about the processes that are employed by government. One of the processes we have looked at frequently over the years is the electoral process and while the November election is still reasonably fresh in our memories, I would like to spend the rest of my time talking about a matter about which all of us have had first hand experience--and about which we should have some concern--the actual process of voting.

Let me start with the conclusion: Michiganders are asked to vote on too many offices and on too many issues. As a result, we threaten to cheapen and undermine a process that is at the very core of our democratic system.

It is said that the most fundamental right we have is the right to vote--to choose those who make and administer the laws under which we live--that all other rights--freedom of speech, press, religion included--would be virtually meaningless if we could not vote.

As crucial as voting is, it is still viewed by many as a necessary evil, by others as a waste of time, and by some even as a vice. "I never vote," says the legendary dowager. "It only encourages them."

A recent article in USA Today noted that voter participation is falling and that "American democracy pines for an electorate too apathetic, too cynical or too busy to show up" and that indifference and anger are writing the epitaph for an American civic ideal.

Why should a right as precious as voting engender such indifference and even animosity? We can all tick off several suspects: negative campaign advertising; a steady diet of political scandal; perhaps a failure on the part of our schools to imbue students with an appreciation of the importance of exercising the franchise.

To this list, I would like to add another, somewhat mundane, candidate and that is that many citizens are unnecessarily intimidated by the very act of going to the polling place and voting.

Now, I don't mean that strong men are made weak by the prospect of confronting the nice little old lady who sits at the folding table in the school gymnasium and guards the voting rolls. But, many of us, I suspect, get up on election day brimming with patriotic fervor and feel that by doing our civic duty, we are, in some small way, helping to guarantee that our democratic institutions will be passed on, more or less intact, to our grandchildren.

Then, we drive through a cold rain to the polling place, which always seems to be in a different--and more remote--location than it was the last time we voted. And, even after running a gantlet of pamphleteers, waiting in line, and then waiting again while the nice little old lady finds our name on the voter registration list, we still feel good about what we are doing.

Then--we see the ballot, most of us for the first time. Sometimes we see it on the wall; most often, it is unveiled to us in the voting booth or cubicle, but we look at it. And, after we recover from the shock of how long it is, we begin to read, and we read such things as--

"Shall separate tax limitations be established for an indefinite period, or until altered by the voters of the county, for the non charter townships, intermediate school district, and Detroit Public Library within Wayne County, the highest aggregate of which shall not exceed 1.4576 mills, (as reduced by the Headlee rollback adjustments and as certified in the 1997 Wayne County Apportionment Report)?"

Or--

"Shall ordinance RZ #97-6 which would amend the Pittsfield Charter Township zoning ordinance and map by changing the zoning classification of approximately 220.65 acres from agricultural (AG) to planned unit development (PUD) for a residential subdivision be approved?"

Or--

Trustee -- Northville District Library Board
Vote for not more than four
(of course, only three names are on the ballot)

And my favorite--

Judges of the circuit court (regular terms -- incumbent positions)
Third judicial circuit
Terms ending 01-01-2005
Vote for not more than twenty.

We read this, and suddenly, we flash back to our days in college, when we looked at that final exam that must have been for a higher level course, and broke out into a cold sweat realizing that, although we thought we had studied enough, we were hopelessly unprepared.

Feeling this way is not something most people relish and it isn't the sort of feeling we should get exercising our most basic right. Remember, we walked into the polling place feeling good--noble even. We walk out feeling slightly abused and a little guilty that we didn't know any of the names of the candidates for the parks board--or even that there was a parks board. And, if we continue to dwell on it, we wonder "If my vote was that uninformed, why did I bother to vote at all?"

Well. Why do we vote? Yes, it's to choose those who will represent us in government and, in some states, including Michigan, to give us a direct say in legislation. But, the basic, underlying reason is to assure accountability--that our elected officials are answerable to us, the electorate. To the extent that voting does not further accountability, it is not doing what it is supposed to do.

Implicit in the nature of accountability is information. Think of the profession named after accountability--public accounting. The whole job of a CPA is to produce and arrange information in a way that permits us to assess the financial condition of a firm and to improve the decisions of the managers of the firm. Similarly, in voting, we need information adequate to permit us to assess the performance and philosophies of our elected officials and improve our voting decisions.

I believe that it is information that is at the crux of the problem. We boast that we live in the information age and yet for the most important civic function we perform, information is inadequate.

Either we need so much information about candidates or issues that it is unreasonable to expect us to be able to get it; or the information we need is so technical that it is unreasonable to expect us to understand it; or, ironically, it may actually be inappropriate for a candidate to provide the information that would allow us to form a reasonable judgment.

Let's go back to my earlier conclusion that we vote on too many offices and on too many issues.

Vote on too many offices.

A study done by CRC a few years ago found that there are over 19,000 elected state and local officials in Michigan. 760 of these are state officials, mostly judges. The rest are local officials. More to the point, each voter in Michigan is confronted by anywhere from 80 to 175 officials to vote on during the course of a full cycle of elections.

We vote for the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, our senator, state representative, 32 members of various educational boards, and a host of judges at the state level and then a seemingly endless array of local officials from the county, our city, village, or township, school district, intermediate school district, and community college district.

To bring all this down to a personal level, at one election, in November 1998, I voted for a total of 50 state officials--4 executive officials, 2 legislators, 2 members of the state board of education, 2 each for the governing bodies of UM, MSU, and Wayne State, and 36 judges.

Two major problems leap out. First, is the election of the judiciary--supreme court, court of appeals, circuit court, and district courts. In what conceivable way does election help to hold judges accountable? First, the job involves concepts unfamiliar to most non-lawyers. Second, in many respects it would be inappropriate for a judge to campaign on the basis of the issues, so what you wind up with is a contest based on name recognition. Third, of all government officials, members of the judiciary should have a degree of insulation so that they are free to make unpopular decisions without the fear of unreasoning or uninformed retribution by the voters. Finally, election of judges unnecessarily presents opportunities for corruption.

The second big problem is the election of the various state governing boards for K-12 education and the big three universities. It is questionable whether we need a separate policymaking body for elementary-secondary education and, while governing bodies for universities makes sense, it is clear that outside of university communities virtually no one knows who is on the boards or, equally important, how to judge their performance.

So, if we were to appoint the members of the judiciary and the state education governing boards, my 50 state officials would be reduced to 6 and I might feel that I had a fighting chance to go into the polling place knowing enough about the candidates to cast an informed vote on each one.

We have a similar problem of numerous elected officials at the local level as well, but the difficulty goes to the structure of local units and solving the problem involves substantially greater difficulties.

County and township government in Michigan to a great extent is a prisoner of a rural past in which virtually all officials were elected. The counties elect prosecuting attorneys, sheriffs, clerks, registers of deeds, treasurers, and drain commissioners. Only Wayne, Oakland and Bay have gone to the county executive form of government and even those counties continue to have a surplus of elected officials.

Townships elect supervisors, clerks, treasurers, trustees, and, in many cases, other officials as well, including officials known as constables, whose function is legally murky and is certainly unclear to the vast majority of voters. Under no rational scheme of governance would we elect constables even if we felt the need to have them in the first place. Unfortunately it isn't simply a matter of declaring that certain county and township officials be appointed because the structure of county and township government in Michigan needs to be modernized first to create an accountable chief executive, instead of diffusing responsibility among a half a dozen elected officials, and these units have been amazingly resistant to modernization.

Bottom line: we vote for so many officials that it is impossible for anyone to find out enough to make responsible voting decisions on all of them. It is almost as if the current system had been structured to frustrate accountability rather than to enhance it.

Vote on too many issues.

Finally, Michigan, more so than most states, votes on issues, often lots of issues, many of them either so arcane or so frivolous that to submit them to the electorate virtually invites voters to tune out. In recent years, we have voted on bear hunting, using bingo for campaign finance, and whether to put the Veteran's Trust Fund in the constitution. And, while assisted suicide certainly can't be defined as frivolous, the proposed statute was 12 legal pages of small type and was very complex.

In Michigan, we have the initiative, whereby virtually any group willing to spend enough to collect the signatures can get a pet issue on the ballot, and the referendum, whereby legislative bodies can refer hot potatoes to the electorate and avoid responsibility for deciding them. We also require voter approval for tax increases and the issuance of debt; constitutional amendments; and city and county charters and charter amendments.

In short, at any given election, we are almost certainly going to be voting on several issues. Frequently, these are property tax issues. The assumption made by many of those that want to see taxes voted on by the electorate is that taxes will be lower than if local legislative bodies had sole responsibility for approving tax increases. If that were true, Michigan would have one of the lowest property tax burdens in the United States. Instead, even after Proposal A, it ranks among the highest.

One of the most egregious examples of abuse of the voting process occurred recently in East Lansing. The East Lansing City Council felt that the city's 52 year old charter needed extensive revision. Normally, that would call for a charter commission to draft a new charter that would be submitted to the voters as one question.

Instead, in order to avoid the expense and the potential independence of a charter commission, the East Lansing City Council appointed a "Charter Amendment Task Force" to recommend amendments to the East Lansing charter. The task force did what it was appointed to do and in two elections in 1997 the voters of East Lansing were presented with a total of 64 separate amendments to the East Lansing charter on issues ranging from the imposition of special assessments to the size of the vote on the city council required to sell municipal utility assets. Simply reading the multi-page ballot took some voters half an hour.

We live in an age that appears to be increasingly cynical about government. I might agree that a degree of cynicism may be warranted in some instances. But when that cynicism goes to the core of the democratic process, voting, we are inviting trouble. Voters aren't dumb. They may not always articulate their problems with voting, but the decline in voter participation clearly indicates that they increasingly view voting as an exercise that isn't worth the effort involved.

The average voter wants to know that his or her vote is important. But, when you are asked to vote on 50 elected officials or 64 charter amendments, it is hard to overcome the idea that somehow our voting process is in serious need of overhaul.

I am not about to argue that shortening the ballot will, by itself, solve the problem of meaningful voter participation. I haven't even touched on such proposed changes as weekend voting, fewer elections, and the use of the Internet. But, unless we can devise a system in which voters have some confidence that their vote is significant, and is not being wasted by voting on offices that should be appointed and on issues that should have been decided by their elected officials, we run the risk of trivializing the most important right we have, and undermining the democratic structure on which it is based.