Early voting starts next Tuesday!

[Rachel MacNair]

Vote No on MO Amendment 7

vote-no-ranking-ban

Friends --

Early in-person voting, no excuse needed, starts next Tuesday, October 22. 

We want to encourage you to get your vote in and get your friends to get your vote in. Election day itself is a good enough time to do that, but you can be sure nothing interferes (like, say, coming down with a cold) if you go early. Plus avoid long lines. 

But also, word from other states is that they're getting very high turnout for the early voting that's already started there. These are swing states and we're not, but there are fewer polling places for those who vote early so we're hoping each one has enough to be worth leafleting. 

(Of course, we still need plenty of leafleting at events beforehand, including your friends and family, book club, neighborhood, events, church or synagogue or mosque or temple, etc. Plus spread on social media.) 

These may well be as good a place to get voters going in as the polls on election day - better, if we have fewer additional electioneers on other issues and candidates to compete with. Also, for those voters who want to take extra cards from us to give their friends and family, they have time to do that before election day. Multiplier effect. 

We're accustomed to getting people coming out of the polls since the actual ranked-voting election will be later, but we'll have to get them going in this time. We may have some be curmudgeonly about whether they've decided how to vote, but we can say cheerfully and correctly that this is near the bottom and a lot of people don't know about it. 

So if you're able to simply take a few of our flier cards and pass them out until you run out when you go to vote, or if you can take a good chunk and spend a couple of hours at it, we do at least know we're definitely reaching people who are voting (either early or on election day).

Below are early locations for Kansas City. Those outside KC but still in Missouri should be able to find your locations on the web. 

Note that the only weekend hours are on Saturday, November 2, 8am to 12pm. A four-hour chunk is a good project, and the Saturday before the election is probably their highest turnout day, the one for people who work all day weekdays. And there are only 6 locations in KC. Can we get six people who are willing to do that morning, or more who are willing to do half the morning? It would be so cool to be able to cover the whole set that Saturday. 

-- Rachel MacNair

Voice and text: 816-753-2057

Picking up flier cards and yard signs, etc.:

Kansas City: pick up at any time during daylight hours from the front porch at 811 Cleaver II Blvd. (used to be East 47th Street). Because a bike path with curb is in front of the house, parking is best on the north side of Campbell; the house is on the south side of Cleaver II.

[Rachel MacNair]

Vote No on MO Amendment 7

No Ban on Ranked Choice Voting

vote-no-ranking-ban

Friends --

Any type of crowd with Missouri voters in it can be leafleted. Please make sure all your Missouri friends are up to speed on what Amendment 7 is and why we have the double negative - it's a ban, so vote no.  

Voters going into polls have the advantage not only that they're not Kansans nor stay-at-homes but definitely Missouri voters. And they haven't voted already. For early voters in KCMO, see locations and hours below. For election day itself, here are all the KCMO voting places. Of course, Missouri suburbs and anywhere in Missouri also need to be covered. 

But come Wednesday, all our vote-no cards (see below) will become useless, and we still have thousands. So please err on the side of over-estimating how many you need, and get them out.

If you're able to simply take a few of our flier cards and pass them out after you vote until you run out, or if you can take a good chunk and spend a couple of hours at it, we can let people who don't yet know about this near-the-bottom ballot measure get the information they need.

Picking up flier cards and yard signs in Kansas City: pick up at any time during daylight hours from the front porch at 811 Cleaver II Blvd. (used to be East 47th Street). Because a bike path with curb is in front of the house, parking is best on the north side of Campbell; the house is on the south side of Cleaver II.

But also, you can use the images below or your own wording on your social media to influence for a no voteI. f you've done it already but that was a while ago, right near the election is a good time to do it again. 

See also our Spreading the Word page for links for tweets to share and other ideas. 

-- Rachel MacNair

Voice and text: 816-753-2057

Support - Preserve Local Elections (anedot.com)

[in...@betterballotkc.org]

Friends --

The ballot candy worked, and Amendment 7 to ban ranked choice voting passed without there being an actual state-wide public debate about the merits of ranking. 

We had two ideas of how to counter this:

1) Have Kansas City pass a trigger law that would put ranked voting in place once state law allows it. This would at least communicate that Kansas Citians want it, making future progress more likely.

2) Have a petition drive for a Missouri "Local Options Amendment" that would use the same technique that was successful for Amendment 7: have the ballot language wording be something that anyone would have a knee-jerk vote yes on if they simply read the ballot language and nothing else. Of course, we wouldn't need a deceptive ballot candy approach to do that -- a straightforward, honestly-stated policy - that locales get to decide how they vote - would do it. 

Trigger Law

We had a meeting with KC city council member Wes Rogers and he was enthusiastic about it, saying he would bring it up with other council members. We were hoping others would be disgusted with it all -- we know Mayor Lucas said so in his Facebook page -- and so might want to. Alas, it's the opposite. They don't want to rock the boat right now. 

We have to wait for the political winds to change on this one. But they will -- after all, they always do -- so we'll keep watching for opportunity. 

Local Options Amendment

You might ask why we don't just go for a state constitutional amendment to establish ranked choice voting state-wide. That would get people excited, and it would automatically over-ride Amendment 7 if passed. 

But here's what happened around the U.S. last November: every single measure for ranking on a city or local level passed. And every measure on a state-wide level failed. Except for a repeal effort in Alaska, but that was a squeaker. 

The problem is that the state-wide ones weren't simple ranked choice voting, but a complicated system being pushed by big money and which includes a jungle primary. That is, a non-partisan primary where all candidates run together without being divided out by party. That's the way we've run our city elections in Kansas City for decades and mainly voters like it, but on the state level, primaries are divided by party. So the idea of a jungle primary got mixed up with ranking and drew opposition because of that.  

We could fix that, of course, by having it be simple ranked choice voting for our state without jungle primaries. We keep making the case that the parties would benefit from using ranking in their own primaries. 

But when cities are doing so very well and states are doing so very poorly, if we poured in the effort state-wide and lost, we'd do it knowing that that was the recent track record. So, not a good strategy. 

On the other hand, having a constitution amendment saying that localities could do it if they wanted, and parties could do it in their own primaries if they wanted, is something that simply gets us back to where we were before Amendment 7 passed. It's strategically sound from a legal point of view and would let us go back to getting ranking built up in the cities so that state-wide becomes more likely later. 

But only getting back to where we were before is not likely to excite volunteers as much. 

In any event, a state-wide petition drive involves way more resources than Better Ballot KC has. There are a couple of other Missouri groups who support ranking among other election reforms who have the resources and expertise, but they're both working on different election reforms instead. They'll be helpful to us if we can get the ball rolling. But how can we get the ball rolling unless a group with resources and expertise and practice is interested? We don't see that on the horizon just yet. 

We will, of course, hop on it if opportunity arises. 

Public Education

What we do know is that whenever an opportunity arises that we can grab, it will work better the more educated the public is about ranking. 

Therefore, we keep up the effort to leaflet, table, and speak to groups. 

Anyone interested in volunteering to leaflet or table, or having an idea of a place that would be good to do so, please hit reply and let us know. And if you can get us invited to speak to a group, the education sticks better when it's discussed at length.