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November 2, 2005

Constitutional Amendments

Going into work today, I heard the Texas Secretary of State talking about the upcoming Constitutional amendment election. Texas has nine amendments going to a vote. Two years ago, a similar ballot had 12 percent turnout. This time they are projecting 16 percent.

Honestly, I couldn't believe my ears. 16 percent for Constitutional amendments?! Surely we can do better than that.

What's driving the "increased" turnout is Proposition Two - defining marriage between a man and a woman. There's others on the ballot, but I'll admit I haven't done enough due diligence myself yet to read all of them.

One thing I give the state of Texas, though, they make it easy to research. The Texas Legislative Council has a PDF file that tries to list the pros and cons of each proposition on the ballot. So, there's really no excuse to not at least try to be educated before Election Day. Once I read up a bit more on the entire list, I'll have to try to post some commentary on them.

Back to my original thought, though. The Secretary of State made a comment that I really liked. Basically, he said that he wanted people to realize that the people in power may come and go, but the changing the State Constitution should matter more to people since it stays with us a lot longer.

It's a sad state that we can only manage 16% of eligible voters for such an event.

Posted by Nemo at November 2, 2005 2:21 PM

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Comments

I suspect the reason for the low interest is that the Texas Constitution has the opposite problem of the US Constitution. The US Constitution gives the government too much latitude to do things, so that expansion of government power is easy. The Texas Constitution makes clear that only powers explicitly granted to the government are the province of the government. Good in theory, but it means that, for example, the can't set the terms for members of the boards of regional mobility authorities.

The one is too general, the other too specific. The people don't want to have their rights trampled. Nor do the people want to be legislators. A happy medium is needed.

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 2, 2005 9:51 PM