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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

The other ballot option in MA this year, Question 2, would enable ranked choice voting for state and federal elections. There was a bit of a thread about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551

What's weird is that before moving to MA I had never even heard of ballot options. As far as I can tell they just don't exist in PA, so social studies curricula just don't teach them. I'm increasingly a big fan; it seems like a valuable escape hatch for a democratic republic for the citizens to have the power to bypass the legislature if necessary.

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We have them in CA as well. I think in general they're a good workaround for getting things passed that the legislature for some reason doesn't have the political will to work on.

On the downside, repealing these things usually takes another ballot measure (the legislature can't touch most of these), so if one passes that turns out to be a bad idea, it'll be harder to remove it. Unfortunately we do have a few persistent ballot measures that have been on the books for years that are detrimental, but there's no will to get rid of them (Prop 13, I'm looking at you).

Occasionally I'll vote "no" on a proposition that I agree with, simply because I believe it's something that the legislature should take up, and doing it through the ballot measure process will end up being too inflexible.

> Prop 13, I'm looking at you

This year's Prop. 15 would radically revise the tax limitation scheme adopted in Prop. 13/1978 by removing much commercial/industrial property from the coverage of it's limitation on annual increases of assessed value, and seems to be polling comfortably ahead.

If anyone's reading this and similarly hates Prop. 13 (1978), then please vote No on Prop. 19 this year!

It sounds good on the surface (helping disabled, elderly, and wildfire victims) but is truly just another way to extend Prop. 13 by allowing the type of rich homeowners who already unfairly benefit from Prop. 13 to continue to do so while buying a new house.

It’s a double edged escape hatch. In practice the vast majority of voters know little to nothing about what’s being decided.

On the other hand many third rail political views have a great deal of popular support. So, IMO the trick is to require a very large number of signatures to get on the ballot.

> It’s a double edged escape hatch. In practice the vast majority of voters know little to nothing about what’s being decided.

Neither does the legislature, in many cases. On balance I'd rather have direct democracy for the majority of things. It has worked quite well in Oregon, which has an initiative system.

Direct democracy also leads to dumpster fires of a policy choice like Proposition 13 for your southern neighbors. No guarantees it wouldn't have passed through regular legislative channels, I suppose...

Given that it's also a third-rail for politicians to try to touch, it sounds like it worked precisely as it should, and gave people what they wanted and voted for.

Oregon passed something similar, albeit weaker; I wish we'd passed something much stronger. Not because I'm anti-taxation, but because funding anything via property taxes is an incredibly bad idea and leads to funding and service quality that's correlated with property values.

If it were redistributive instead of local that wouldn't be a problem, and excluding primary lived in properties gets rid of any moral hazard.

Both of those would be a substantial improvement, yes. At that point, you'd just have an unusual, specialized wealth tax.

If you're going to change property taxes that much, though, you might as well go all the way to a land-value tax, which would also reduce problems with assessment and improvement.

Agreed. It is useful to pass things that a legislature may never pass, like term-limits for legislators.

In Washington State, the initiatives frequently yield legislation that has conflicts/dependency problems with the existing law, something that happens far less-often with bills from within the legislature.

Also agreed that a high signature-number bar is one of the simplest/expedient ways to limit ballot-initiative spam. We have a person who has successfully made it their personal mission/job/source-of-notoriety to place some sort of small-government initiative on the ballot every year.

And steal office chairs/break campaign finance laws, but I'm not sure if he does that for the notoriety or just can't help himself...

Yeah, on the ballot in our state is a law that supposedly prohibits the enforcement of local gun regulation, only allowing state regulation. Except its so poorly worded its unclear to judges and police and such what it even means.

If you're interested in voting systems I suggest checking out my links in that thread about cardinal systems (much simpler and better in almost every way). You might also want to check out Clay's comments there and elsewhere, he's the co-inventor of STAR.

I think the results from the Fargo election are much more promising and interesting for those looking for representative voting systems.

Oh ha ha ha, wait until you find out about Massachusetts Proposition 2.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_2%C2%BD

> What's weird is that before moving to MA I had never even heard of ballot options.

I'm not even from the US - what are ballot options? I can't find much about them, but from what I've seen, they seem similar to referendums?

Yes, a ballot question can be a referendum or an initiative. Basically, at least in MA, if you as a citizen want a law passed or repealed and you don't think the legislature will take it up, you can collect signatures of people who agree with you. If you get enough, it will be added to the next state election as a question for the voters to yea or nay.

In other words, it's a direct democracy end run around the usual representative democracy system.

Ah cool, that makes sense - I think that's called a citizen's initiative in the Netherlands and in the EU, where it has only existed for 14 and 13 years, respectively. Indeed a great addition to representative democracy.

Indeed. As a Montana citizen, its been excellent seeing medical marijuana legalization pass through ballot initiatives, and hopefully this year full legalization and regulation.

The people and their representatives don't always agree on every issue, and having an outlet for that nuance is very beneficial. I think any amount of direct democracy we can add is a good thing.

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