Yesterday I attended my first legislative session in downtown Raleigh. I was excited to be in attendance to watch the debate over an important piece of legislation called H88, the Electoral Fairness Act. The goal of this legislation is to give the voters of North Carolina more ballot choices other than Democratic and Republican candidates. This is especially important since more than half of all legislative races in North Carolina are uncontested. Essentially voters can go to the polls to vote for one candidate (since write-ins are typically thrown out). This is a concept that should stun any red-blooded freedom-loving American.The meeting was scheduled for 1:00pm in Room 1027 of the Legislative Building. I made the mistake of going in through the only door marked 1027. That door happened to be the “Members Only” entrance. I found myself staring at a crowd of onlookers, pages, cameras and stunned representatives. If these people don’t get their acts together, I might run for office and make going through that door a habit. Needless to say, I took a couple laps around the meeting rooms and figured out that I should enter through 1127. The room was crowded, and I was twenty minutes late, so I couldn’t be sure if they discussed H88 yet. I figured it was safe that they hadn’t gotten to it yet, since I still saw people I recognized from the NC Green Party, the NC Libertarian Party and the Wake County Taxpayer’s Association in attendance.
At some point there was some discussion regarding H88. I missed most of it because I was so far back that I couldn’t hear. At one point everyone got up and left. WTF!? I heard something about it being re-scheduled for today. It wasn’t heard today and was pushed off until tomorrow. I’m kind of getting the impression they don’t want to talk about this.
Ultimately, the members of the North Carolina Open Elections Coalition are not in favor of the bill in its current version. The current fourth version of the bill was amended at the last minute in a late-night session (conveniently) to actually make the ballot access laws stricter. The Coalition is in support of the third version of the bill. This version will drop the percentage of signatures needed to put a party on the ballot to 0.5% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election. This would put the Libertarian Party back on the ballot immediately, since more than 37,000 signatures have been collected so far during this petitioning cycle. It also lowers the percentage of votes needed to stay on the ballot from 10% to 2%.
I could go on-and-on about why this is needed. That would be re-inventing the wheel, however, since a lot of good information is available at the Open Elections Coalition’s website. There are also a number of ways you can help out at this site as well. It was frustrating, if not educational. I went into the day thinking that we would have something concrete to go on with this piece of legislation, but as I already know, this isn’t how our government works. Maybe if we elect new representation, it will work better. We can only hope.
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