If we just look at a few political races from yesterday’s election, we can easily see what I have been talking about for some time. The Gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia were both influenced by large amounts of money flowing in from outside the State’s borders. Political parties, Political Action Committees (PACs), special interest non-profits, business interests, and individuals not living in the State opened their checkbooks and provided advertising that was intrusive, obtrusive, less than truthful, and misleading all in the hope of creating confusion in the minds of the voters so that a particular candidate would win the election. Whether you agree with the outcome, or not, it is clear that all that money added complexity to the voter’s decision making process.
The third election question I want to examine is an Initiative in Washington State. In its simplest form, Initiative 522 would have required foods, sold in grocery stores to carry a label informing the consumer if the ingredients were genetically engineered. You can see how this issue could easily be complicated and confused by one side of the question or the other – and it was.
According to this morning’s Seattle Times, “Supporters argued that consumers have a right to know what’s in their food. “Opponents called the labeling plan flawed and misleading and said it would only scare consumers away from a promising technology.
“The initiative campaign put Washington at center stage in debates over both genetic engineering and the role of out-of-state funding in elections. “With $22 million in donations, the “No” campaign set a record for fundraising by one side in an initiative battle in Washington. Only $550 of that total came from state residents. The biggest donors included the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and Bayer CropScience, all heavily invested in genetically engineered crops.”
This morning, the Initiative seems to be failing so the opposition seems to have won. The question that we should be considering is whether or not the citizens of Washington State lost? Looking at the list of donors to the “No” campaign, all of the money, except that $550, came from non-constituents (people and organizations who did not have the right to vote in the election). Did all that money sway the outcome?
On the “Yes” side of the question, there was also outside (non-constituent) money flowing into the State. Again returning to this morning’s Seattle Times, “Almost 70 percent of the funding for the “Yes” campaign came from out-of-state businesses and organizations, led by California-based Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps and the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C. But supporters also included about 10,000 individuals, many of them Washington residents, who gave amounts ranging from $2 to $20,000.
“The approximately $30 million raised by both sides made the race the second-highest spending initiative in Washington history, after the 2011 liquor-privatization measure and its $32.5 million in donations.”
On the “Yes” side of the vote we can see a lot more money being donated by residents (constituents) in the State. In fact, it appears that just the number of individual donors was heavily skewed to the “Yes” side of the question. That said, compared to the population of the State of Washington, the constituent involvement in the race (based on donations) was pretty small. We would do well to wonder if the majority of citizens really cared.
What we can say with 100% clarity is that the election in all three of these cases was influenced by non-constituents and that is definitely not a proper outcome for any Republican-Democracy.
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