Help me vote

[melannen]

Poll #20679 Election 2018

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

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If a ballot question says: "To amend the County Charter to restrict the County Council's ability to increase the minimum value of contracts requiring competitve bidding from 25,000 to 50,000 dollars", does a "yes" vote mean

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They will be able to increase the minimum value
2 (5.3%)

They won't be able to increase the minimum value
36 (94.7%)

You should vote "no" regardless because if they are being that obfuscatory they are probably Up To Something

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True
26 (72.2%)

False
10 (27.8%)

Read the below text from the introduction of the comic I randomly borrowed from a friend yesterday, then give me your best estimate of what year it is from:

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IN writing this introduction, a mild sense of deja vu is unavoidable. As it was (...) when I began work on this volume, it is election (...) in both the UK and the USA. Over here, it appears the Thatcherite "vultures" may be coming home to roost--or at least to hover patiently over the whining Tory body politic. It would be nice to think that (...) and his Republican reptiles might similarly be forced under their stones. Perhaps such an occurance would be a tiny encouragement, indicating a minute turbulence of conscience disturbing the blank stare of our culture's self-righteous myopia.

Trouble is, it's probably too late to make any difference. The planet's immune system is still going to reject us if we don't ease up immediately, and the democratic left has no more desire for revolutionary change to our suicidal consumerist lifestyle than does the right.

My personal response to the state of our civilization has been to acquire a boat to live on. Then, when the oceans rise, I shall be able to sail cheerfully about, sneering at the capitalists marooned on their skyscraper-islands in the flooded financial districts of the Northern Hemisphere, basking contentedly in the solar radiation pouring, unfiltered, down upon a sterile ocean...

(I don't know if stumbling on that made me more or less anxious about tomorrow. I guess in some ways it's good to remember that the current state of affairs is not really that extraordinary. And in some ways it's terribly depressing...)

Anyway, off to read the actual comic and not check any news or social media until Wednesday. See you on the other side!

Comments

[melannen]

(for the curious: the text was from April 1992, Jamie Delano in the first Hellblazer trade.)
(and the nonpartisan lwv guide says Yes on the ballot question means they will be able to increase the minimum. not sure I believe this.)
(it also includes a provision to require that they publicly post the winners of all county bids which I am 100% in favor of, though, so: conflicted.)
(I think I'm going with No for Suspicion of Shenanigans though.)

[nicki]

Oh, yay, I got the quote year.

[melannen]

Spot-on!

[rmc28]

Yes! I guessed correctly :-)

(In 1992 the Conservative party had been in power since 1979, Thatcher had been forced out, the Labour party thought they were going to win but didn't, although what followed was a huge amount of the Conservatives tearing themselves apart over the EU, plus ça change, and a landslide victory for the Labour party in 1997 under Tony Blair.)

So that's what I was thinking of with "Thatcherite vultures" which kind of locates it to post-Thatcher pre-Blair. But also there are very few UK general election years that line up with US ones, which would have been an easier / more systematic way to go about it:

Recent UK election years:
2017
2015
2010 - ? Not Presidential, also Obama not a Republican reptile
2005
2001
1997
1992 - Y
1987
1983
1979 - Thatcher becomes Prime Minister

[melannen]

Yeah, if you're the sort of person who remembers which years Britain had general elections, it really limits the options compared to just going by feel. :D And it's definitely set post-1980s by Thatcherite - if not for that, I'd've said "guess the decade" instead, but post-Thatcher limited that too much. (Although "rising seas" being a major concern also really sets it at least late-1970s; we didn't really figure out global warming until then.)

[rmc28]

The thing is, I do know the general election years since 1979, because my parents were campaigning in all of them, and I was probably trailing around with them as a young child, and actively campaigning myself from about 12.

But I forgot to compare the years against US presidential years until *after* I'd figured out which one it had to be anyway.

[melannen]

Yep I figured US and Americans would be about on about equal footing there! (Though it's interesting everyone's assuming it was an American presidential year, when there's nothing in the text that says it couldn't be a congressional election.)

[lannamichaels]

(and the nonpartisan lwv guide says Yes on the ballot question means they will be able to increase the minimum. not sure I believe this.)

Okay now I'm trying to parse this with commas and the like and still not getting it. Is there another actor involved with the minimum value of contracts other than the County Council?

(it also includes a provision to require that they publicly post the winners of all county bids which I am 100% in favor of, though, so: conflicted.)

This does seem like a worthwhile goal, but, yeah, my brain can't handle the rest of that. Are there various groups pro or against whose judgment on it you'd trust?

[melannen]

This one hasn't really gotten any attention, afaict - county charter issues rarely do, because literally all the monetary values were unwisely hard-coded into it in the 1970s, so we are always voting to slightly raise them on minor things just to keep up with inflation.

The local paper usually takes at least a tepid editorial stand on everything but recused itself on this one because the formal bid process involves the county buying ad space from them. So the only outside opinions I've got are individual people, most of whom are just opposed on principle to letting the county council get away with *anything*.

I don't think it's super high stakes either way, tbh, because the $50,000 threshhold is still within the standard no-bid contract range for other nearby jurisdictions, and lower contracts still have a bidding process, it's just a less time-consuming one - it's not like they're trying to make it unreasonably high or go no-bid. I just can't get over how confusing the language is.

The best I can come up with is that maybe "restrict" is a term of art that doesn't mean the same thing in constitutional law that is does for normal people? But whoof. I really doubt most people are going to be voting for what they think they are with that one.

[ratcreature]

I think what the question means depends on what the current county ability is because "amending" something presumably would change it and the restriction in the other direction. If the charter currently restricts their ability to increase, voting yes would mean they could then increase it after, if currently they were free to increase they can't after with a yes. And now my head hurts.

[melannen]

The current charter, AFAICT, does not mention the Council having the power to change it at all (restricted or otherwise) - the current $25000 is hard-coded into the charter, and there is no provision for how to change it other than going through the process of amending the charter to add one. (Our county charter is. not very well-designed.)

That doesn't help much, does it.

[ratcreature]

No. Don't the groups for and against this have to provide more detailed information on this? Whenever we get a referendum on something here you get a voter brochure sent to you with statements by supporters and opponents, so you can see what each side on the issue is saying about it and who the supporters are.

[melannen]

We don't get an official one, but both the local paper and a national nonpartisan activism group (The League Of Women Voters/vote411) do their own. They both say that "yes" on this one means the minimum is increased.

You have to go looking for those, though - the only thing you automatically get is the text of the referendum itself. IIRC from when I was an election official, the government actually isn't allowed to give out, or post in polling places, anything other than the exact text of the amendment, to prevent them from introducing further confusion/bias/shenanigans via the explanations. (and also presumably to encourage them to obfuscate less in the actual text.)

The full amendment is longer than what I posted, but the rest is about different details of the bidding process, and doesn't clarify the main point at all.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

They need an amendment to have an English major on retainer.

[marginaliana]

How interesting - we get an official booklet with an impartial summary, including something that says "a yes vote means the law is unchanged" to make it much clearer.

[melannen]

I think, at least for charter/state constitution amendments, which is 90% of the ballot issues we get, a "Yes" vote always means the law is changed (because the wording is always "vote to amend".) It's just not always clear what the change *is*.

Looking again at the sample ballot, I think maybe what's on the sample is an impartial summary rather than the actual text of the law, at least for the state constitution ones. But it's the exact text that's on the actual ballot, anyway, and that's all we get. (The state ones are easy this year because one of 'em's "don't let the governor steal the casino revenue from the schools anymore" and one of 'em's same-day voter registration.)

[recessional]

Amending the charter would definitively prevent them from raising that minimum value.

Action is: amending the charter to restrict an ability of the council.

Ability of the council is: increasing the minimum value of contracts requiring competitive bidding from lower number to higher number.

So.

Re quote: Hah. I knew it was a Bush, but I was conflicted as to whether or not it was Sr or Jr.

We drag the world forward very very slowly.

[melannen]

See, I agree with you entirely, but both my mom and all the voters' guides say the opposite. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the part of why what's going on now seems uniquely bad is that if a lot of it had happened fifty or a hundred years ago, it would just have been business as usual and nobody would have blinked.

[recessional]

Hell twenty years ago a lot of it was happening with very little blinking. Let alone 50.

And even twenty years ago a lot of the people who are the ugliest now didn't HAVE to be loud: the window of what was acceptable in all the spaces they cared about was such that they were kinda invisible in the mass and passed without notice.

Now enough has shifted that they can't do that, so they stick out and also feel Defensive As Fuck All The Time.

So yeah. V much so.

[recessional]

Also: I mean that doesn't mean they're right. XD Have I ever told you the story about how the town I grew up in ended up a tiny sea of "we never change our clocks" in the middle of everyone else changing to and from DST/ST? There is legit danger in this kind of thing being obfuscatory even if nobody is trying to get away with anything!

[lannamichaels]

I will leave my 1990 of just-woken-up-shame there, with my only wavering defense being that, what with the way the political situation has been, calling 1990 as part of the 1992 US election season could very well have been accuate. :P

All I know about the UK election schedule is that it happens whenever they feel like it?

[melannen]

It used to happen whenever they feel like it, but lately there has been a movement to change it to "Every five years *or* whenever they feel like it, whichever comes first". Although with all the political mess going on other there right now, I'm not sure if that's still something that's being pushed.

(I mean, tbf, this isn't a presidential election year either, it just feels like it!)

[stellar_dust]

I can imagine how to change it so it would read that way, but your interpretation is definitely how it's written! Vote no till they hire a grammarian because you sure don't want an actual amendment to be that unclear. Anyway the amendment should tie the number to inflation, not set another arbitrary limit.

[stellar_dust]

Change "To restrict" to "which restricts" and... Maybe?

[melannen]

There must be some actual reason they decided to hardcode all the numbers into the charter, not just obstinacy, right? Surely?