San Diego 2010 or Mississippi 1964?

SunshineSunshine 8 Comments

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Today marks a rare, outrageous, and somber day in the City of San Diego. Managed Competition will not appear on the November ballot. Some might celebrate this as a victory, but labor and business leaders agree, every signature should have been counted.

The Union-Tribune features a detailed story here. In summary, the MC campaign had the legal democratic option of counting every signature cut out from under them by the City Clerk and Registrar of Voters late Wednesday because the bureaucrats were unsure if they’d be able to finish a count in time. DeMaio’s only option would be to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars suing the City of San Diego, forcing them to give over 134,000 voters their voice. But a lawsuit would only perpetuate the timing problem, giving even less time for counting after a likely victory, and cost the City hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Whether you supported or opposed Managed Competition what happened today should outrage you. As I look around at this I ask is this San Diego in 2010 or Mississippi in 1964?

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Comments 8

  1. I take silencing voters and the precedent it sets very seriously. Today some bureaucrat says signatures can’t count because she doesn’t want to count them, tomorrow we’re holding elections via a selected sample of likely voters so that some bureaucrats don’t have to do their job if they don’t want to, or worse because they want to keep their beliefs in power.

  2. And that’s the equivalent of murdering three civil rights activists.

    You act like DeMaio didn’t know the rules and that Republicans have never gotten a measure on the ballot before. You can blame it on the clerk and registrar if you want, you can be a crybaby, but I’ll invoke the conservative principle of personal responsibility: DeMaio signature-gathering operation didn’t produce an acceptable ratio.

  3. I prefer a strict constitutional constructionist. The Clerk followed the law. Sunshine makes an absurd argument about the Clerk and Registrar denying DeMaio his civil rights. If the labor unions were pushing an initiative, I would want the Clerk and Registrar to follow the rules. Sunshine fails to make an argument for an alternative course of action. Should the Clerk and Registrar make a political decision to ignore the validity of the signatures? The end does not justify the means. DeMaio and Christen need to accept full responsibility for their own mistaken decisions. I’ll await the press release from them taking responsibility. Sunshine needs to apologize for her/his grotesque comparison of managed competition to an violently ugly chapter in American history.

  4. The precedence this sets is disgusting. Do we determine who wins an election by random sampling ratio? Will we one day? The law allows for a sampling to save time and money but voters who exercised their (strict constitutional) right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances should not have that right abridged, no matter the issue, because some bureaucrat doesn’t want to work a little harder.

    In terms of the rules and knowing, clearly the information changed over the 48 hours. We went from the Clerk issuing a cost approximation for a hand count one day to a “sorry, changed my mind, no hand count” two days later. If everyone knew the rules, that would include the Clerk, and should would have said from the beginning that no hand count is available and not issued a cost estimate. The fact that this was submitted late and could not be on the November ballot but to early to trigger a special is a ridiculous nexus of loopholes that liberals would be screaming over if the direction of the initiative was reversed. It is the job of government and bureaucracy (like the clerk, council, and ROV) to work as hard as humanly possible to serve the people; if that means working overtime to count signatures then do it, don’t give excuses. If +96,000 people signed this should be on, if not then it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t fail because a formula or a bureaucrat decide so.

  5. Sorry Sunshine, but the formula is fine with me. The less of my money they spend on counting ballots the better. Demaio’s team is at fault. If they wanted the peoples voice to be heard, they should have quality checked their signatures. I supported the measure, it sucks its not going on the ballot, but I don’t blame the ROV. Maybe the team should have worked harder and skipped a few padres games.

  6. Good thing they wouldn’t spend your money on it, in a hand-count the person calling for the count pays every penny. And by that logic we can save your money by forgoing elections and just using accurate statistical polling of who should win, or more realistically take a random sample of ballots cast and determine the winner, that will save a lot of time and money. The legal precedence this sets is appalling.

    One thing we do agree on, always skip padres games.

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