Another instance of State legislatures ignoring their constituents' wishes and covering their asses. Remember this next time you end up in the voting booth.
Sure does! That's why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection.
On the other hand, the state is losing population on an absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm free enough to do the same.
At my local polls, the semiannual elections contain ballots for 5 or six different districts (federal, state, county, town, school district, fire district, police district) as well as referendums on several tax proposals and even things like road improvement projects.
The reason that doesn't happen in Australia is because state and federal elections cannot be held on the same day.
This (local political action) is something I've found interesting for a while, but never enough to actually get involved. Seeing this made me look up some data for the area around me, since I was curious and the OP didn't have enough data for my area.
Apparently the town council elections are coming up soon, with several slots available. If I'm reading through this data correctly, it would take about 2% of the town's residents to vote for a council member to knock out the incumbents, based on last year's election. Someone somewhat active in the community can probably arrange that.
Your vote doesn't matter in Presidential Elections the chances of a state changing its color is slim to none unless your Ohio, Florida or another possible swing state.
Your local politics is where things happen. In my city I ran for School Board (lost by 400 votes but will run again). The turn out was 11%! Everyone HATES our Public School System here in my city due to a number of factors but no one votes. So if you want to get open data for your town city you can do that. (That is what I was running for was open data and government in my school district and now the whole thing is getting audited by the state to see if they comply with the Sunshine Law (They don't)).
If those bills pass, elections would still be run by state and local governments. There would simply be additional restrictions on how they choose to run elections.
Brit here. How often, and for how many posts do you typically vote in elections in the US? It seems like everyone down to the local Librarian is an elected official. Are these votes held one at a time, or is there one massive election for a couple of dozen posts all at the same time every year or something? What's the typical turnout for these elections? How is it decided which posts will be elected and which ones are appointments, and does this vary from place to place?
In comparison, we generally have two elections every 5 years. One for our MP in Westminster, and one for our local council and these are often held simultaneously. For many people, that's it. Some cities also have Mayoral elections, and there can be town or parish council elections as well but whether these exist or not is very local. I don't think we have any direct elections to administrative positions, unless you count Mayors. There might be some rare local exceptions to that but they're most likely purely ceremonial.
Wait, who elects prosecutors? The public or some other group? I've never heard of going to the voting ballots for anything other than a referendum or electing various levels of legislators (typically municipal, state/province/departement/district/whatever, federal/national, and perhaps transnational like European; in NL we also vote on water boards but they don't really matter as far as I can tell).
reply