Comment by lokar
18 hours ago
This gets at something I think a lot of people don't really understand. They see polls that show strong support for policy X, and then complain that politicians don't enact it. What they fail to consider is that while a strong majority may be in favor of the policy, it's not the top (or top 3) priority, and they will support candidates that have the opposite position on X, if they support their top priority.
This is situation where well thought out (and moderately constrained) referendum process can help achieve the majority desire for a policy that would not otherwise be considered important enough to drive the selection of representatives.
Yeah, that's essentially what happened here in Oregon.
And the 2nd chapter of it is after the ballot measure passed, the state liquor commission drug its heels for a couple years, because most of their executives are far more conservative than the median voter here (a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Eventually the state legislature got fed up with the obstructionism and passed a "ok, we're just doing it how CO did, stop stalling" bill.
And here we are. The sky didn't fall.
There's a lotta ways ballot measures can go into stupidity, but this is an instance where it helped force the bureaucracy to align with the majority voter position.
>(a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).
Because their industry is in bed with government so their priority #1 is coordinating with the people of that industry. The actual "value producing" activity of buying, distributing, selling liquor and managing those relationships is a sideshow.
You see this in every deeply regulated industry.
> They see polls that show strong support for policy X
i would imagine those polls are full of selection bias - even if the poller is trying to be as neutral as possible. People who would agree to participate in polls tend to have strong(er) feelings than those who don't.
> referendum process
instead of referendums, there should be a representative vote by the elected politician, but with an option for the voter to submit their own vote (provided they pass a cursory examination that certifies they have read and understood the bill they're voting for).
E.g., a senator or an elected politician has N number of votes for a bill, where N is the number of people he/she represents. If those people don't want to participate in a bill voting process, the politician will vote on behalf of them (like they do now, supposedly).
However, an individual voter who wishes to, can certify their understanding of said bill, and rescind the representative vote for his electorate and vote himself directly on the bill. The politician will now have N-1 votes on that same bill.
This means for issues of importance, the individual can choose to participate. For issues that they don't care about, but have a vague sense of direction, they have their votes delegated to the politician that they elected once every X years.
Also it doesn’t matter if there’s majority support for a lot of things because most people don’t vote. If you want to get a policy enacted make sure you and your friends vote in elections regularly.