Monthly Archive for Term Limits
Term Limits Stories Posted in October 2008
The Aussie ballot keeps voters down under
Category: Ballot Access · State: New Jersey Oklahoma · Source: NewJersey.com
They used to call him "the man with the golden arm."
Nick Caputo was the Essex County clerk for 29 years. Among the clerk's duties was the task of putting capsules representing the political parties into a drum and then giving it a good spin. Apparently Caputo had calculated that centrifugal force would keep the capsules in place. And the Democrats got Row A for all but one year of his tenure.
Meanwhile, over in Hudson County the choice was made by picking Ping-Pong balls at random. But if a smart pol put the Democratic ball in the freezer overnight, it was Row A all the way.
Such are the drawbacks of the Australian ballot. That's the technical name for the type of government-created ballot that's been in use in America since the 1880s. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But the Australian ballot made all sorts of mischief possible. Worse, it solidified a two-party system that gives us no real choice at the polls. On Tuesday, Americans get to choose between the big-government party and the bigger-government party. Which is which? It's hard to tell these days.
This is fine for liberals, but conservatives have nowhere to go, except to a third-party candidate who has no real chance of winning. That's no accident, says J. David Gillespie, a semi-retired political science professor from Charleston, S.C., and author of "Politics at the Periphery: Third Parties in Two-Party America."....
Favoring a Simple Way to Get to Another Term
Category: Term Limits · State: New York · Source: New York Times
So Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has decided he wants a third term. Now what? The simplest and most direct route — and the strategy that Bloomberg advisers say he is most likely to pursue — is to have the City Council revise the term limits law, at least temporarily. The law was adopted in a 1993 voter referendum that amended the City Charter. To amend the law without going through a special election, Council members will need to introduce a bill, perhaps at one of their next two meetings, scheduled for Oct. 7 and 23. The bill would most likely be assigned to the government operations committee, whose chairman, Councilman Simcha Felder, Democrat of Brooklyn, is a close ally of Mayor Bloomberg’s. Under the law, the committee must hold at least one hearing on the bill, giving the public a chance to weigh in. Then the bill would go for a full vote of the Council. It requires a simple majority, 26 of the 51 members.
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