I thought I would throw this out here since we are wrapping up the election season.
Back in 1988, the first election where I was eligible to vote, our community held a referendum on whether to annex to the neighboring city. A second part of the referendum would establish a community council that would have limited powers under the city government, but the community council would only be created if the area decided to annex.
So the idea was to vote for the annexation proposal, and if you approved, would you then approve of forming the council.
The referendum for the community council passed, but the annexation did not by a difference of about 100 votes. I figure the city decided they could live without us after that since they havent tried again, and the area remains part of the county.
It definitely helped increase my faith in the democratic process and in my neighbors. I’ll let them remain nameless for now unless someone else remembers the same event.
So any similar tales where your fellow citizens impressed you with their cunning wit?
And to keep this mostly clean, presidential elections are excluded, so please no snide remarks about 2000 or '04, or any others. I am more interested local or state elections like where the dead guy won, even though he died well before the election. That has to be a major downer for the loser, though I dont know if that has ever really happened. And that might not necessarily be a dumbass decision, but recognition that the other candidate was truly terrible.
We had a couple of town funding issues a few years ago - one to build a third fire station, another to equip and staff it. The first one passed, the second one failed. We still haven’t built the empty shell, though.
We had a ballot issue a few years ago regarding adding fluoride to the city water supply. That degenerated into a “dialogue” worthy of the BBQ Pit, with the “you’re poisoning our children” faction vs. the “our kids’ have too many cavities” faction.
Having grown up in a city with fluoridiated water and not having been noticeably poisoned by it, and having a kid whose pediatrician told us to make sure he took a multivitamin with a fluoride, I voted for it.
Then-Senator John Ashcroft was defeated in his 2000 reelection campaign by Mel Carnahan, even though Carnahan had died in a plane crash two weeks before election day. Because of Missour election laws, he could not be replaced on the ballot.
One of the elections when I was a student in San Diego had a choice between funding libraries or building a third ballpark. It was only a couple of years after finishing the last one, the proposal was for downtown where there was already a significant parking and traffic problem, and the libraries were considering limiting operations to 4 days a week due to lack of money.
The ballpark issue passed. I didn’t bother voting for a while after that. What’s the point when it’s obvious that almost no one else thinks the way I do?
That happened locally, too. John Kirvin, the long-time town supervisor, was running for reelection. About a week before the election, just before a televised debate was about to begin (20 minutes later and it would have been on camera), he suffered a massive heart attack. Despite the efforts of his opponent to perform CPR, he died. Kirvin was reelected, since it was too late to remove his name from the ballot. I voted for him (the other guy was not a particularly good candidate. They’ve named the town hall after him.
In New York this year, the voters handily reelected Alan Hevesy as state comptroller, despite the fact that he had been censured for using a government employee to chauffer his wife for three years. Hevesy has had to repay the state $90K (and counting). This is especially egregious because the State Comptroller’s job is to prevent the misuse of state money, and there’s a chance that he will be removed from office early next year. But Hevesy was seen as such a shoo-in before the scandal hit that the only Republican to run against him was an incompetent boob. If they had run a serious candidate, they might have won the election.
I would have to list the California ballot iniative that provided for gubernatorial recall elections. Mind you, I’m not choosing this because it actually led to an election where an Austrian muscleman defeated a midget and a quadraplegic porn mogul. I’m picking it because the election rules it describes are such a farce. If we assume that every voter votes rationally (i.e. votes in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of their favorite candidate becoming governer) then it’s possible to get into a circular pattern of recalls. You could have candidate A in office, then have A recalled and replaced by B, then have B recalled and replaced by A, and repeat indefinitely. Pure insanity.
While it’s not necessarily a humorous result, I’ve always found it hilarious that County Coroners are a political, elected position. How on Earth could a Republican and Democrat differ on whether or not or how someone died as a political matter?
In my hick home county, the coroner is actually the head of the local Democratic party and, strange considering the locale, an Indian immigrant. Nice guy, too; buys my mom really nice birthday presents (she’s a nurse at his clinic.)
Just out of curiosity, which one of these was Gray Davis, and who was the third guy?
Around here, I’ve elected a county drain commisioner a few times. I can’t imagine why this needs to be an elected position. What political consequences could there possibly be in how the county’s storm drains are managed? What are the official Republican and Democratic party platforms on how the public drain system should be administered?
[Dr. Pedantic]Gray Davis was thrown out of office by the recall. Ah-nuld ran in the special election to replace him. He did not run against Gray Davis.[/Dr. Pedantic]
I imagine that the midget was Gary Coleman and the porn king was Larry Flynt. Forgot to mention the porn star, Mary Carey.
In Ohio, the only person who can arrest the county sheriff is the coroner, so it has to be an elected position. You can’t give that much power to a bureaucrat.
This might not be as unusual as you think. There are a lot of rural areas where there are doctors who are Indian immigrants but where there otherwise might not be very many, or any, others among the citizenry.
We have the dumbass Hancock Amendment here in Missouri. So the voters of the municipality that I live in had to vote whether or not to raise the senior citizen, non-resident golf cart rental fee at the municipality’s 9-hole golf course from something like $4.50 to $5.00.
When I was in high school, there was an initiative in CA making it a felony to slaughter horses for the purposes of human consumption. I was too young to vote, and also too young to get out of being roped into the most pointless American Government “debate” on the topic. As I recall, the only two proponents of the measure in our class were girls who had loved horses when they were little, and thought it was horrible that we would ever kill them. The facts that we kill all sorts of other animals to eat and that horses would still be killed for animal feed did not dissuade them in the slightest, but the vast majority of my fellow students agreed that it was a foolish law.
Bob came in second place on the vote to name the residual NW territories of Canada when the new territory of Nunavut was created. I think “restavut” got some votes too. Sadly, the overwhelming choice was sticking with the boring old “NW territory.” Boo.
