The Oregonian just can't let up, can they?

Paul Gronke

From "The Stump", the Oregonian's attempt to rationalize the thumping of M65, which they incessantly hyped in four separate editorials.

First, Measure 65 failed because of the political mood in Oregon and nationwide. This is an unusually partisan year for Oregon.

Yes, right.  That is why the main Senate contest is going down to the wire.

Second, it failed because of dirty union politics. The unions did their best to kill this measure and retain their grip on Democratic candidates. The Oregon Education Association, for example, sent out a false and misleading mailer smearing Measure 65 as a Bill Sizemore initiative.

Whoa.  Ouch. I didn't get this flyer and only one person posted here and said they did.  Don't know if this was a typo on the part of the OEA.  But one flyer does not a dirty negative campaign make.

Finally, Measure 65 didn't get a good public airing. It was the last of a dozen statewide measures, a moderate idea with a wonky ballot title in a packed, high-stakes ballot.

Keisling and Paulus stumped all over the state.  This was editorialized about in every major newspaper.  There was a City Club debate.  There were radio shows on every major radio station.  I heard more actual analysis and debate about this measure, honestly, than most of the other measures on the ballot except the two crime measures!

It is of course quite possible that 65% of the voters decided this was just bad public policy.  I guess that possibility didn't occur to the O's editorial board.  It must be that Oregonians just didn't know enough and were misled by those big bad unions.

  • Eric Parker (unverified)
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    M65 failed because it was too confusing for the average person and raised more questions when other questions were answered.

    The only person who truly understood the measure was Phil Kiesling. Unfortuneatly, he couldn't relay that understanding into simple terms we all could understand.

  • Joel H (unverified)
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    If those all-powerful unions and their dirty politics were a major factor, why'd M64 get so much support?

  • LiberalIncarnate (unverified)
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    I voted in favor of this, but didn't have a strong opinion either way.

    More damaging to free speech and unions is M64 which currently show passing.

    Why isn't Sizemore in prison yet?

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    Paul, I think the truth is somewhere in between your perspective and the Oregonian's. My experience was generally that in spite of the editorials, blog coverage, etc. that every person I ran into who had NOT been exposed to that, was leaning "no."

    I don't think the concept is fundamentally confusing, but the ballot title did not provide a good foundation; I think Phil did a great job explaining it on a number of occasions, but unfortunately the engaged people you contact on an issue like this are a small minority.

    Among people I talked to, when they got the connection that this measure would make it so their voting choices were not determined by party registration, they generally liked it; but I don't think that connection was made effectively without extensive discussion.

    So I think the Oregonian's point, that a lack of public discourse was partially to blame, is very apt; it may be that the necessary level of public discourse was out of reach, but I do think it would be a mistake to assume that the preponderance of votes came from people who had carefully considered the measure, and made a well-informed decision.

    At any rate, I look forward to further discussions on how best to reform our voting system, here or elsewhere.

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    "every person" above is an overstatement; I meant "most people."

  • Jonathan Radmacher (unverified)
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    Thank you, Paul, for your willingness to dig into this measure, debate the political stalwarts, and help bring some understanding to why and how this was a dumb (and/or dangerous) experiment.

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    Also, the M 65 supporters greatly outspent the opponents. If you include amount spent collecting the signatures, the supporters spent about 3 times more than the opponents. If you do not include the signatures, then they outspent the opponents by about 5-3.

    The OEA mailing was to its own membership, not to the public. That does not excuse including the falsehood that Measure 65 was a Sizemore measure, but the mailing had a limited audience.

    Eric Parker appears to admit that he could not understand M 65. Rest assured, Eric, that others did understand it.

    Why did M 65 lose? Probably because of the ballot title, which conveyed little useful information to voters. The juxtaposition of M 64 and M 65 is an illustration of the effect of ballot titles on outcome. M 64 (union political deductions) was outspent probably 30 to one or more and truthfully had the onus of being a Sizemore measure. But it had a catchy ballot title and thus will come very close to winning (I think the late-counted vote in Multnomah County will defeat it).

    The current ballot title appearance (15 word caption, etc.) was set up by the Republicans in the Legislature during their reign, with lots of advice from Sizemore. The current structure is poor, with a 15-word caption, 25-word yes statement and 25-word no statement. In nearly all cases, the result is repeating the same few words 3 times over. It would be far more informative to have a single, say 50- or 100-word, paragraph to describe the measure. In past sessions I have also written better ways to get judicial review of ballot titles, but virtually no one in the Legislature has expressed interest in it.

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    I am glad it failed. Now I look forward to working with the legislature on some election changes, such as same day voter registration and Fusion voting.

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    Paul - Most ballot measures succeed or fail because of he ballot title. Voters tend to be fairly low information about such measures, primarily because of the expenses associated with buying media. OEA and SEIU need to spend $4-$5 million every election cycle to defeat bad ballot measures, and in a year when the airwaves were saturated to the tune of $20 million or so for the Senate race, even that was not enough to decisively kill measure 64, which had a fantastic ballot title that explained next to nothing about what the measure actually does. Measure 65 had the opposite problem -- a terrible ballot title that explained next to nothing about what the measure actually does.

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    I had a feeling M65 was going down - almost every person I spoke to said they weren't sure how they felt about it so they ended up voting no.

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    Measure 65 stood on a fundamentally flawed premise: that those who do the work building a political party have no inherent right to choose their own candidates. No one I spoke to had any trouble seeing how unfair this is.

    It's not complicated: those who do the work get the reward. So, if you want the reward, get to work.

    Do we need electoral reform to make it easier to "get to work" and increase our political diversity? Yes. But it needs to happen in a way which rewards average people for being politically active, not tosses them aside.

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    To save others the hassle of navigating the Oregonian's byzantine web site, here's the direct link to the editorial in question.

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    Dan, following on Sal's comment -- I think your comparison of the money on the "yes" and "no" sides should be tempered with some information on how much was spent on the general election campaign. It was very low; I'm not sure what the norm for controversial measures, but off the top of my head, I believe the total spending on Measure 65 was far under $1 million, as compared to Measure 50 last year, which was over $15 million.

    If most people are not being reached by either campaign, that increases the relative influence of the ballot title.

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    M65 failed because it was too confusing for the average person and raised more questions when other questions were answered.

    That's my sense from the people I know who have commented to me on their votes on that measure--most of them not being wonkie enough to have had any exposure at all to the debate.

  • Jackson H (unverified)
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    Measure 65 failed because it's a terrible idea. If we want open primaries, let's implement real open primaries where independents choose one party primary to vote in, not these crazy Lousiana-style "jungle primaries."

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    Pete, fair enough. I thought it was a spirited and mostly above board debate. I think editorializing four separate times, not counting Nielsen's individual op eds in the Sunday section, was a bit over the top.

    I thought blaming the loss on misinformation and a partisan election was just wrong.

  • George Seldes (unverified)
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    The absurdity of the Oregonian's editorials never ceases to amaze -- the idea that M65 didn't get enough "air," despite the overwhelmingly one-sided media bias in its favor is like saying that Sarah Palin was unpopular because she was an unknown from a small state.

    No, she was more unpopular the more people learned about her. Just like M65 -- the more you learned about it, the less there was to like (unless you were an advocate and dug in harder and harder).

    "Moderate" has become the new empty-term du jour, a vaguely positive appellation that conveys absolutely no information other than the fact that the person using the term is trying to slide something through without having to actually defend it on its merits. M65 was and is actually quite a radical notion, dismissing in a stroke more than a century of practice, solely to satisfy the whims of its sponsors, most of whom are politicos emeritus (the Special Ks, Keisling and Kitzhaber, for example) rather than politically active folks.

    As a thought experiment, imagine that we used a "top two" initiative process, since that's what the proponents offered for filling offices -- all the initiatives go into one giant hopper and everyone gets to vote on them, regardless of how much they know about them or anything else, and then only the top two initiatives would appear on the ballot for actual enactment. Obviously a stupid system: we could easily wind up with only the worst measures on the second ballot, and good ideas that needed more time to understand would be excluded and prevented from making an appeal to voters when it counted. The ones with the most money would likely crowd out all the others.

    And, yet, despite this, if you look at the arguments used in favor of M65, all of those arguments would support using the same system for initiatives.

    THAT is why it failed; despite the constant drumbeat in its favor from the mainstream media (always willing to see the cost of elections climb even higher), people saw through it.

  • SallyR (unverified)
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    I talked with my freinds and co-workers about Measure 65 today. Everybody said the same thing - it was a weird measure. None of us think the current system is broken - so why change it. But, who are we? Just a bunch of average Oregonians, no political junkies or super-active party members among us. However, a couple of us do read BlueOregon and other blogs now and then.

  • George Seldes (unverified)
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    Meanwhile, in terms of an actual pressing need for reform -- a reform that could use the backing of folks who are interested in improving elections -- here's some thoughts about Georgia and Minnesota (that could just as easily apply in Oregon):

    Meanwhile, Georgia is having a runoff because the Republican got 49.9% in a race in which the Libertarian got about 4%. [In MN] The exit poll, conducted by the Strib [Star-Tribune] itself, showed Franken had a 6% edge over Coleman in terms of who Barkley supporters would vote for if Barkley weren't in the race. Given that Barkley received over 437,000 votes, that 6% would have given Franken over 26,000 additional votes, far more than the roughly 600 he now trails by. Here's the poll: http://www.startribune.com/politics/33580494.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUs
  • artsasinic (unverified)
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    I'm a union member, and my union (ufcw) didn't make a recommendation on this. I voted against it because I can think, and for me, any measure that would allow 2 people from the same party to be the only choices in a general election is a bad idea. Some form of second choice vote would be my preference.

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    I hope we don't lose track of the rest of the legislative reforms. The state legislature still functions poorly.

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    <h2>The comment by George S. cries out for instant runoff voting, which was used in Pierce County (Tacoma) this week.</h2>

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