At the last Town Council
meeting, under Other Business, the council debated making a change to
the Charter, once again. This new Charter change is to restrict
placing bonds valued over a million dollars to only on the November
ballot. This would eliminate any bonds over a million dollars from
being decided in June. The rationale
behind this move is that more voters vote in November than do in
June. This would ensure more voters have
a say on million dollars bonds.
Although I understand the
reason for this change, I do not agree with it. This
is like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.
The right option is to do everything possible to increase the voter
turnout in June before we start changing our Charter. If you
remember in November 2011, the people voted to be able to vote on the
Municipal budget and the council still have not changed the Charter
to allow this. Instead, the council changed the number of voters
required to petition for a special town meeting. Contrary
to popular belief, this is not the same by a long shot.
However, this Charter change took less
than a month to get the language started and the council wants to add
an emergency clause.
If the problem is low
voter turnout in June, then the solution should be increase voter
turnout to equal or come close to the voter turnout in November. So
how do we increase voter turnout:
- Work with the heads of the Democratic, Republican and Independent parties to push for larger turnouts.
- Work to promote voter turnout in June. This does not mean push issues!
- Use notification avenues such as the School Department and Municipal listing for promote voter turnouts.
These are just a few that
I came up with and I am sure more people have additional methods to
increase voter turnout in June.
What has happened is
there is so much information placed on the November ballot for
November, voters are annoyed by the time they get to Charter changes
and bond issues that they just check off block in order to finish be
they are very busy. This is even more
apparent in National and Gubernatorial elections.
What
this means is that you do not get responsible responses to issues of
critical importance to the community. This is no different than
fewer voters showing up in June to vote on critical issues.
Remember, every voter in
Lisbon knows when voting day is in June and November; they know where
the voting polls are located and if they do not show up in June to
vote then I guess they were not interested enough. So
tell me again, why the voters that do show up in June are less
important than the voters that show up in November.
Let’s
look at this problem realistically and not rush into changing the
Charter.
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