When you cast a vote, it’s important to know exactly what’s going on. You need to know what the race is. You also need to know exactly who the people are.
No one needs a situation like the confusing butterfly ballots in Florida in 2000 that some say had third-party candidate Pat Buchanan scoring votes meant for Vice President Al Gore.
And that is just matching up this name with that office. What if the issue was more confusing by nature?
Ballot questions are notoriously tricky. They are generally complicated issues that are phrased like college essay questions, but boil down to a yes or no answer. But sometimes how you read the question can change how you answer it — but not how it gets counted in the end.
In 2019, the Marsy’s Law ballot question in Pennsylvania asked about a constitutional amendment for crime victim rights. While it was still on the ballot and many people answered it, the court threw the issue out because it didn’t follow the rules. A state constitutional amendment question is supposed to be just that — one question — because someone could support one part but not another. The Marsy’s Law question put too much on the table.
But Pennsylvania is not alone in that issue. It can happen anywhere.
A recent Spotlight PA article looked at two upcoming constitutional amendment questions and how their language is drawing criticism.
One is the effort to let the legislature call an end to a governor’s disaster declaration. That’s definitely a personal tug-of-war between the lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf, who they have taken to court over his pandemic response actions.
It’s the governor’s Department of State, however, that runs the election and therefore writes the ballot questions. The proposed language asks if voters would support “increas(ing) the power of the General Assembly” and affecting the “existing check and balance.”
There is a reason Senate President Pro Tem Jake Corman, R- Centre County, has issues with this. It is not just partisan posturing.
In 2012, Florida had 11 long, confusing questions before voters, making ballots as much as 12 pages long. Ohio faced similar language complications on a 2018 question about reducing penalties for drug crimes. In California, Proposition 16 was rejected in 2020 by 56% of voters, but supporters say the wording wasn’t clear.
Admittedly, it’s hard to boil down an issue that has been debated for months or years before it gets to the point of a referendum. How do you take something 100 lawyers have labored over for hundreds of pages of briefs and proposals and distill it into something shorter than a tweet? How does it still carry all the information and context?
All the more reason to keep the politics out of it.
There are proposals to have gerrymandering curbed through nonpartisan a third-party panel. A similar plan might be helpful for ballot questions as so many could put either party against party or branch against branch in a power struggle.
The language should be straightforward. You shouldn’t have to answer yes to vote against something or say no to support it. No one should have to diagram the sentences in the question to figure out exactly what the response should be.
And if the government isn’t set up to let that happen, something has to change. Except that would probably require another ballot question.
— The Tribune-Review/TNS
