Telegraph Herald. Nov. 9, 2014.
Voting easier, but where are the voters?
Whether you are a voter who is happy, unhappy or indifferent about the results of Tuesday’s general election, you can’t say that you didn’t have a chance.
With many states relaxing absentee-voting rules, while offering same-day voter registration, satellite polling places, expanded early-voting dates and, in some cases, all-mail elections, it is by and large easier than ever to exercise your right to vote.
A major reason given for most of these initiatives is that they will increase voter participation. The easier government makes it for citizens, more citizens will vote. It’s more expensive to take all these steps, but higher voter turnout is good for democracy.
That is how it is supposed to work. But it hasn’t.
Despite all these initiatives, voter turnout is pretty much the same as it always has been, going back six decades or more, when you either voted on Election Day or went through a pretty rigorous process to cast an absentee ballot.
As political columnist George Will recently observed, “We used to have Election Day. Now we have Election Month in this country - in some cases, election eight weeks, six weeks.”
Some states are considering changes in their election processes. Some have made them. For example, Oregon and Washington now conduct all elections by mail.
Iowa should make some adjustments. In 2014, the Hawkeye state had a 40-day early-voting period. Staffing offices to accommodate early voting costs taxpayer dollars. The public expense of operating polls on Election Day doesn’t go down because many people voted early. The costs that day are pretty much the same whether 250 voters or 500 voters show up that day.
And it’s a long day. Iowa polls operate 14 hours - some one to two hours longer than nearly all other states. Iowa also keeps its polling stations open until 9 p.m. Only New York and some locations in North Dakota stay open that late. The reason we’ve heard for Iowa’s late close is to accommodate farmers, who might need to finish the evening milking and those final chores before heading in to the polling place. That was reasonable. However, now, with plenty of days allotted for early voting, is Iowa’s 9 p.m. close still necessary? After all, every state has farmers, and those folks in Illinois (7 p.m. close) and Wisconsin (8 p.m.) manage to stay part of the electoral process.
Yogi Berra, the baseball legend whose malaprops could fill quotation books (and do), once said, “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop ’em.” Well, the same could be said about people and the ballot box. If, despite all the initiatives to make voting easier, people still aren’t voting, does it make sense to keep adding time and expense to the process?
It’s appropriate for states to consider more time- and cost-efficient ways to conduct elections.
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The Des Moines Register. Nov. 8, 2014.
State workers’ lawsuit shows there is no free lunch
Back in 2011, when the Branstad administration eliminated certain meal reimbursements for state workers, there was ample reason to think the move would not produce the promised savings. A year before, Gov. Chet Culver had proposed similar policy revisions, but lawmakers balked, pointing out the changes would have an impact on state workers’ benefits and therefore needed to be negotiated with labor unions.
Branstad, who tends to ignore such warnings, took it upon himself to impose the change in August 2011, allowing meal reimbursements for work-related travel only if the employee also required overnight lodging. That meant workers who were traveling around Iowa doing their jobs, could not seek reimbursement if they stopped somewhere for lunch or dinner before returning home.
As expected, three state unions challenged the new policy, and in a January 2013 decision that spoke only to one of the three unions, an arbitrator struck down the change, saying it represented a “deterioration of an existing benefit” workers were entitled to receive. At the time, the Branstad administration said it would abide by the ruling and would use it as a “template” in settling with the other two unions.
But it was only last week that the administration came to terms with the largest of the three labor organizations, agreeing to pay an estimated $1.49 million to employees represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. That’s in addition to the $250,000 in reimbursements already paid to members of the other two unions.
It should not have taken 21 months to reach this settlement with AFSCME. As far back as April 2013, the administration’s own lawyers were warning that if the state took the matter to arbitration, the likelihood of winning was “not high.”
Administration officials have defended their actions by pointing to the potential taxpayer savings associated with the policy change. But lofty motives are no excuse for ill-conceived and poorly executed actions - particularly when those actions are guaranteed to be counterproductive.
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Iowa City Press-Citizen. Nov. 5, 2014.
Mason made a tough call in signing letter
Should University of Iowa President Sally Mason have agreed last month to add her name to a letter asking Iowa lawmakers to support the new funding formula approved by the Iowa state Board of Regents this summer?
- A formula that, when fully implemented, would take millions of dollars in annual state funding from UI and give it, instead, to Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa?
- A formula that undervalues the higher educational costs associated with UI’s full range of graduate and professional schools?
- A formula that focuses much more on the number of Iowa students going into a university than on when/whether/how those students graduate?
- A formula that basically punishes UI for being so effective in recruiting out-of-state and international students?
- A formula that has triggered an enrollment war that pits Iowa’s public universities against the state’s community and private colleges?
The answer from many corners of the UI community has been a resounding, “No!”
What’s the point, they ask, in having a president who won’t stand up for UI against a proposal that so clearly is damaging to the university’s educational quality and financial bottom line?
Some even go as far as to suggest that Mason - rather than put up with the regents’ continual insults and injuries - should have offered her resignation rather than sign the letter. Then, they argue, the campus community could have rallied around her and forced the regents to change their minds.
Other members of the UI community support Mason’s decision to sign the letter because - whatever their disagreements and disappointments with her - they fear the regents would replace Mason with a president significantly less interested in maintaining UI’s high standards of teaching, research and service. (At the very least, they worry that the regents, under Board President Bruce Rastetter, would ignore campus input during the search for Mason’s successor.)
We doubt that, had Mason decided to resign rather than sign on to the letter along with her UNI and ISU colleagues, the regents would have been persuaded to change the formula in any way. By agreeing to add her signature to the letter, however, Mason ensued that the regents will ask lawmakers to provide UI with an additional $12.9 million for the next fiscal year.
That one-time allocation won’t do anything to fix the long-term consequences of the funding formula, but it would give UI a transition period until its recently ramped-up recruitment efforts attract a greater number of in-state, high school graduates.
And that might be the best UI can hope for right now. Given the governor’s strong support of the new formula, it’s unclear how effective state lawmakers can be in trying to force the regents to change their minds about a formula the board approved by an 8-1 vote.
We don’t envy the decision Mason had to make in terms of whether to publicly support a plan that cuts the budget for her own institution. But we don’t think her signature on that letter undercuts her and her staff’s efforts to lessen the impact of those budget cuts as much as possible.
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Fort Dodge Messenger. Nov. 6, 2014.
Time to reconsider U.S. Senate rules
For generations, the U.S. Senate safeguarded substantial minorities through its rules on filibusters. Providing senators with concerns about proposals could muster support from about 40 percent of their peers, they could block action by the Senate.
Early in our history as a nation, senators recognized small majorities should not be allowed to enact legislation if it was objected to by reasonably large minorities. Hence the Senate adopted a rule that filibusters could be broken only by votes of 60 percent of members.
That safeguard stayed in place for many decades, until two years ago.
Then, frustrated that some senators were blocking nominations to federal positions by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid broke with tradition. He gained approval by the Senate - by the slim vote of 52-48 - to allow filibusters regarding nominees to be ended by a simple majority vote. Reid called it “the nuclear option.”
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by four members of Congress and the Common Cause group - who sought to declare all filibusters unconstitutional.
In effect, the highest court in the land stood by the little-used practice of filibustering to protect large minorities.
When the new Senate -with a Republican majority - convenes in January, thoughtful lawmakers should reopen the question Reid pushed through two years ago. Filibusters in any situation should be permitted, simply to protect against what has been called “the tyranny of the majority.”
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