Greetings from
The Publisher . . .
The Election, Donna Frye & Intent — more complicated and simpler all the time
All the talk about who should be the mayor of San Diego took me time traveling recently. It took me to when I turned 15 and could get a learner's permit to drive. I was excited enough to spend six weeks digging a car out of the snow and getting it running in January–February in Alaska . The cold wasn't a problem when you factored in the comfortable drive to high school that awaited.
The driving test was different. If you were born in the winter, you knew that sometime while driving you would be asked to stop— immediately . This always occurred on a side road that was covered with ice. The expectation was that once you stopped, you would be pointing in the same direction you were going before the “stop” command, plus you'd remain in your lane.
Thanks to some literal “field” experience in the surrounding area, I passed the test and before long I had a driving experience that I have always remembered.
I was sitting at a stop sign and it was my turn to go. The speed limit on the Air Force base was 15 mph in the populated areas, so no one was moving too fast. I was at a three-way stop and in the middle lane. Straight ahead was a ditch. Starting ever so slowly, I began to turn left and then I was along for the ride. The car slid across the entire intersection and sideways into the ditch. Ice Karma, neh?
Explain that to your dad. Really, Dad, I was only going 5 mph. Well, the front end was, the back end was going a little faster. Given how little control I had while driving carefully, I could imagine how easily I could have slid into someone.
Well, I didn't, and I'm not writing this from death row. If I had killed someone would it be murder?
Thankfully, our whole system of punishment is based on intent. Was the cause of death premeditated? We notice intent and apply punishment accordingly.
Certainly when it comes to the Constitution we think in terms of intent. How many times have we heard the phrase “the intent of the Founding Fathers” included in arguments?
The one man, one vote idea has been expanded since the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. We know they wanted it to be a living, expanding document that fit the times and evolved. But then, as we all know, the devil is in the details. So we have lawyers.
Whether or not Donna Frye will be mayor of San Diego has attracted a group of them. The more I hear and the more complicated it gets the more I wonder if we aren't getting away from the basic principles that should be guiding us.
A quick summary is that Frye has the votes to be mayor if the ballots with her name written on them are all counted. If you count only the votes that had both her name written in and the circle filled in, she lost and Dick Murphy won.
It seems simple enough, but there's more. The scanner cannot count votes with an “x” or check mark. Those circles needed to be filled in. Those counting the votes did so if the votes were for Murphy or Ron Roberts since the voters intent was clear. They did not fill in the circles for those who wrote in Frye. So we end up with the intent of one voter being considered and another voter's not.
In addition, under city law the votes for Frye should have been counted, but the registrar said it was a State election not a city election. State law says don't count them unless the circles are filled in. But the State law also says that local law takes precedent and city law prevails. The registrar's call was that it was a State election. But was it a Federal, State, County or city election? It was all of the above. When wouldn't it be some combination? If the city law was just for those special elections, it might have mentioned it.
Later, the city attorney issued an opinion stating, among other things, that it was fine not to count all of Frye's votes because the State has the right to streamline the voting process. That's important too, he said.
Somewhere in all this is a person's right to vote and have that vote counted. If the laws don't support that, maybe the laws should go. It's not too complicated focusing on principles. It is when you focus on the distractions or details.
The only alternative suggestion would be for the city attorney to volunteer to streamline his own vote, and not have it counted, when the counting process needs to be expedited. Maybe ballots from people who are willing not to have their vote counted could be earmarked to save time. Call it a symbolic vote.
There's a similar precedent being touted now. On the radio the other day a voting expert was saying that it didn't matter that a majority of people would not vote. But the fact that they were able to vote was important and symbolic. The fact that no one believed the vote would lead to a stable government in Iraq —and even that the majority of the population didn't recognize the legitimacy of the vote—did not matter. Just voting was important.
I thought that actually deciding an election— by voting—might be more significant. Wouldn't demonstrating how it worked in practice, not in theory, be more meaningful? Are we in fantasyland?
Given that a majority of us/US don't vote, and that the group in Ohio investigating the vote count there insists that there is no way Bush could have won in that State, it occurred to me that we really are exporting our version of democracy. (See www.freepress.org for more on Ohio.)
I'm constantly amazed these days by the contradiction between our Constitution and our government's actions. When Rumsfeld can form his own army we have to admit this is the wild, wild, un-Constitutional West manifest.
It seems so bizarre sometimes it's hard to distinguish between what's real and what's made up. I was sure it was a spoof when I read about the White House spokesman who fielded a question about the inaugural address. He stated that the President's vow to spread freedom and stand with the oppressed against tyranny, was not meant to signal a shift in U.S. foreign policy. That was real according to Reuters and they don't spoof.
The mountain is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The molehills are the details we get lost in. Votes are supposed to count and be counted—period.
It's hard to believe that what is happening in San Diego with the Frye votes could be happening in different forms all over the country, but it is. That's how we ended up with the only two-term President never elected once.
Have a great month,
Steve Hays
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