Relics of Hypocrisy: Thumb On the Scales of Just Causes

 

The first time ever I went to vote at the March exercise called "The Warrant articles" and elections, in Hampton, I thought this must surely be some sort of elaborate joke, or a community performance ritual, like Oberammergau Passion Play in some Bavarian village.

Town Hall Debate: Real Democracy

There were two or three ballot sheets with choices for candidates for the School Board, Library Trustee, Zoning Board or the Budget Committee, which needed no explanation.

But then there were forty odd "warrant articles" with several paragraphs each, like the one asking the voters to authorize a $1,000 fine for people who did not pick up their dog's poop from the beach. That one, I voted against, thinking $1,000 sounded a bit harsh for that, admittedly uncouth, offense. But I thought maybe I was missing something. 

Mostly, however, the paragraphs were undecipherable to me--stuff like whether the town should spend $10,000 for a study of water damage abatement along Ocean Boulevard and its effects on undermining the seawall. No clue there. Is $10,000 a reasonable amount for such a study? Do we even need a study? What happens if we don't do the study?  So I skipped most of those.

Later, my neighbors explained I was supposed to go to the "Deliberative Sessions" held before the voting, where citizens could ask questions about each warrant article and get full explanations, and hear objections or support for each.

So, the next year, I did that, but they lasted for eight hours and most people seemed to drift and and out, so they could voice support or opposition to some particular article. There might have been 200 people at these meetings, and about 3,600 voters show up to vote on voting day, so it's a safe assumption, most of them have not taken the time to consider each of these articles.

Turns out: you really needn't have worried about people not showing up at the Deliberative Sessions, to deliberate, to consider the pros and cons of each article: Once the final articles are presented to the town, there is a helpful line printed beneath the paragraph presenting the article and directly above the boxes where you check your choice:

RECOMMENDED BY THE SCHOOL BOARD 6-0

RECOMENDED BY THE BUDGET COMMITTEE 5 YES-2 NO

Then you check:

YES:   ____

NO:     ____

So, there you have it. You might not know anything about the article, but the town officials on the various committees tell you how to vote. Presumably, they have debated or thought about these articles.

So, if they have done all the hard work, who am I to vote against what they recommend?  It's as if a jury has sat through a week of testimony, hearing the evidence of guilt or innocence and then voted, and then asked me for my opinion, as if I should even have an opinion.

One might ask: Why go through the whole charade that citizens are considering these questions, if you are going to tell them how to vote, in the end?

Well, it helps folks give a patina of legitimacy to whatever cause they support: "Well, the citizens of the town voted for it!"

This always came up when objections were raised to using taxpayer money to support a church school in town: "Well, the voters voted to do it!"

Alicia Preston X

Alicia Preston Xanthopolus pressed this argument in her editorial in the Seacoast News:

What is wonderful about our form of government in our small town, is that we actually vote directly on these funds. That is quite an empowerment and if “we the people" want our tax dollars to go to a religious organization, we do and should have the right to say so.

And there you have it: it's democracy in action!

When someone at one Deliberative Session observed that Sacred Heart School is the only non public school to ever get a special taxpayer account in town, the reply was: "Well, anyone can get it. All they have to do is get the voters to approve it."

When someone then put forward an article to do that, the same SHS advocate objected, saying if we made money available to just any school, then a school for the Church of Satan might move to town and claim that money, and the idea was voted down.

Voting her Heart

When a citizen complained that the School Board and the Budget Committee had always voted to recommend the slush fund to the taxpayers, and that's why it always passed, and it wasn't really something the voters wanted; it was simply something they did not understand, that objection was met with stony silence.

Influencer

That's the way we've always done it here.

Until this year, when the School Board and Budget Committee voted to not recommend taxpayer funds for the church school, and members of the congregation howled bloody murder over the nasty practice of those committees putting their thumbs on the scales of justice.