It’s rare to read a story about the recent Croydon budget adjustment that doesn’t mention how small the number of voters was, as if it was some kind of anomaly.
The final vote was 20-14. For comparison, here are the tallies for votes in recent years, at the town and district meetings, where votes were reported in the minutes: 16-8, 38-5, 20-17, 18-15, 20-12, 22-19.
In towns like Croydon, small voter turnout is the rule, rather than the exception. Apparently, this is only a problem when the people who show up vote to keep more of their money, instead of letting others vote to take more of it away.
But if low voter participation is the problem, then I’d like to propose a solution, which is to require a town to have 95% voter participation, and 95% approval from participating voters, before any tax money, can be appropriated for any purpose.
In a town like Croydon, with approximately 600 registered voters, at least 570 of them would have to show up to any meeting where taxes are to be appropriated, and at least 542 would have to vote in favor of any appropriation.
Note that this would still require approval from only 90% of the registered voters. So it’s not really close to the kind of ‘consent’ that is required by the Declaration of Independence to allow a government to act, let alone to violate the right to property that it’s supposed to be protecting.
But it might, as they say, be close enough for government work.
Right now, the people calling for a special district meeting to overturn the original vote don’t feel that they have to compromise, because they think that they’re going to win. (We see similar attitudes in Concord, and in Washington.)
And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with majorities, and even ‘super-majorities’ like 2/3 or 3/5. They encourage what we might call an Eric Cartman-like approach to political disputes: If one side gets slightly more votes than the other, it can do what it wants.
In contrast, imagine that you need to have nearly everyone on board before you can take money or property, or liberty from anyone. Now you have a situation where you can do only things that have overwhelmingly widespread support. This would require people with different viewpoints, and different priorities, to actually listen to each other, and to collaborate instead of compete. How refreshing would that be?
Ironically, if this were to happen in Croydon, we would end up with a budget that is much smaller than the $800,000 budget passed at the regular town meeting, because the voters of the district would have to actually agree on what the money is supposed to be used for. This would eliminate most extra-curricular activities and many electives. It would pare down ‘special education’ until it’s actually special again. (Currently, 25 percent of Croydon students are coded as having special needs.)
It would disentangle education from other kinds of services, like daycare and job training, and therapy. And it would focus on subjects (like literacy, and reasoning — rhetorical, logical, scientific, and statistical) that are understood by nearly everyone to provide a public benefit, as opposed to private enrichment.
If this level of approval — and thus this level of collaboration — were required, we would end up with a budget that would reflect Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s conception of perfection — not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
And it would similarly reflect the state supreme court’s rationalization in the Claremont cases for obliging the state to provide ‘each educable child an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government’.
I say ‘ironically’, because requiring even this watered-down version of consent would make it clear that the people calling for the special meeting do not, in fact, object to small turnouts. What they want is a turnout that is just small enough that they can use majority rule to confiscate property, where consent — approximated by the ‘super-duper majority’ contemplated here — would prohibit that. Which is to say, they don’t have a problem with small turnouts, just with what they see as the wrong turnouts.
