Navigating the various county reforms on the ballot, not on the ballot, might be on the ballot……gave me one hell of a headache this past two weeks. And I was only looking at one of them. Can we give them all names?
There’s one proposal, the Bill Mason proposal, that creates 11 county council seats, like city council seats. It’s on the ballot in November. Being the trouble maker that I am, I wanted to sea how many signatures it would take to get on the ballot for one of these new council seats. No one knows.
A counter proposal for countywide at large representatives to a reform commission has candidates currently gathering a number of signatures equal to 1% of the vote in the latest gubernatorial election in the county, something like 4,500 signatures, but those are county wide. Split the county into 11 districts, does that 1% figure apply to each seat? Or will the signature requirement for those council seats be arbitrarily determined administratively after the proposal passes? Why does this matter, you say, oh blogger of the fake city council race?
Silly readers.
As we all know, I looked at this problem closely regarding the newly drawn Cleveland City Council districts.
The ballot access for these races might be the most onerous I’ve ever encountered this side of post-Soviet Armenia, and might be challengeable in court. For starters, the new ward boundaries were just announced in April, the deadline for submitting petitions is June 25. There has been no accommodation for this timing. Council candidates still need 200 registered voters in the new ward to sign their petition, for a council seat with less than 25,000 residents. For comparison, ballot access for a US congressional seat, averaging 500,000 residents, requires 50 signatures. Equal protection, anyone?
Will the signature requirement for such county council seats will be this onerous? That matters. It matters so much it should probably be in the proposal that’s on the ballot, but isn’t.
Whoever is in charge of setting this signature bar basically controls who will have access to the ballot to run for those seats. If the number is arbitrarily high, the same old douchebags will be lining up at the next rung on the ladder they’ve been waiting all their careers to climb onto. If it’s reasonably low, like for a US congressional seat, more people will have access to the ballot who don’t usually run for office.
It’s the difference between real reform, and re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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