By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Are you dissatisfied with the candidates but uncomfortable voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Maine may have a solution: ranking your choices.

Mainers will vote this November on implementing ranked choice voting, where in a multi-candidate race they would mark their first, second and third choices. If no candidate receives a majority, then the candidate with the fewest first place votes is eliminated. Their votes are awarded to their voters’ second choice candidates. If there’s still no majority winner, the process continues until one candidate has a majority.

Such a system is uncommon but not unheard of. In Arkansas, military and overseas voters rank their choices because there isn’t time to mail them a ballot if there is a runoff. According to FairVote, an election reform supporter, 11 cities elect their city officials using ranked choice voting. It’s how Ireland chooses its president and Australians their Parliament.

Supporters say such a system, otherwise known as instant runoff voting, ensures winning candidates have majority support. Under the current system, when there are multiple choices, the favorite candidate of a minority can be elected over several candidates with broad appeal who split the vote. Party primaries below the presidency solve that problem with runoffs, which are costly and often attract a low turnout. But general elections are winner take all, which, through the Electoral College, is how Bill Clinton became president in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote.

A ranked choice system also makes it easier for voters to vote their conscience. Voters are forever being told they must vote for the major party candidate they fear least lest they help the more objectionable candidate win. Voters in a ranked choice system can support the candidate who reflects their values, giving him or her a fighting chance, while their second choice votes will go to their preferred – or less unpreferred – major party candidate.

Supporters say a ranked choice system forces candidates to try to appeal to a broader slice of the electorate and to run a more positive campaign. Current campaigns are won by firing up the base by pitting Americans against each other. In a ranked choice system, second choice voters may provide the margin of victory, so candidates have an incentive not to alienate them.

Ranked choice voting really is no different than how we make decisions elsewhere in life. Sometimes the doughnut shop is out of our favorite, so we pick our second favorite from among a wide selection. Under the current system, voters often have only two doughnuts from which to choose, both of which they may dislike – or there may be a third that’s in the back that no one tells them about.

The negatives? Ranked choice voting is more complicated, would require investing in new voting technology, and may not make much of a difference in Arkansas.

Maine has a history of multi-candidate elections where the governor is elected by a minority – less than 40 percent in five of its last 11 elections. One of its U.S. senators, Angus King, is an independent.

Arkansas does not have a strong third party presence or a history of independent candidates, though it did vote for independent George Wallace for president in 1968. There lately haven’t been a lot of races with multiple credible candidates for major offices, or a lot of runoffs in party primaries.

Maine’s proposal does not apply to the presidential race, which is governed by both state law and party rules. Arkansas would have had to work with the national parties to implement ranked choice voting before this year’s primaries, and who knows how that would have turned out. But there would be no problem changing the law for the general election.

It’s clear that Americans are unhappy with their democracy. Typically they respond by trying to change people, which is why Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two candidates very different from the norm, won so much support. But attempting change through people is often disappointing because the system keeps one person from having too much power, thank goodness. To make lasting change, change the system.

Is ranked choice voting the best way to do that? I’m willing to try this doughnut, or at least let Mainers do it and ask them how they like it.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Many Arkansans are unhappy with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as their choices, and so are some Arkansas lawmakers. But how many are willing to say they don’t support their own party’s nominee? So far, at least one.

Rep. David Meeks, R-Greenbrier, says he is “99.9 percent sure” he won’t vote for Trump and definitely won’t vote for Clinton.

Meeks, who last year adopted three boys under age four, says he is “a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third.” He says Trump is unfit to be president, even dangerous.

“It’s more about the bullying, the intimidating, the fact that he just doesn’t seem to understand diplomacy, doesn’t seem to be humble,” he said.

Won’t his voting for someone else help Clinton because it’s one less vote for Trump? Meeks doesn’t see it that way. Trump will win Arkansas regardless, he said.

One other legislator has declared his opposition to both Trump and Clinton – the Legislature’s only independent, Rep. Nate Bell of Mena. Bell was elected as a Republican six years ago but left the party last year and isn’t running for re-election.

The outspoken Bell has very publicly opposed Trump for a long time. He says Trump promotes bigotry and “a version of nationalistic populism that is eerily reminiscent of virtually every dictator in the history of the world.”

Trump, of course, is the Republican nominee, and so therefore most Republican lawmakers will support him. Regardless of their feelings toward him, they oppose Clinton.

But Bell said few lawmakers with whom he’s spoken enthusiastically support Trump. Those particular lawmakers don’t want to offend Trump supporters, so they’re making a political calculation. They expect him to win Arkansas but lose the election, and they’re trying to remain viable.

“When he loses, someone’s going to get blamed, and typically that blame’s not going to be placed on Hillary,” he said. “The blame’s going to be placed on Republicans who didn’t support Trump sufficiently to help him win.”

Bell said he probably would keep his views much more to himself were he running for re-election in his pro-Trump district. Similarly, Meeks said it’s easier for him to stand on principle because he doesn’t have an opponent in the fall.

“Arkansas is going Trump, and it’s just not a battle that you really want to face or you really want to deal with,” he said of his fellow lawmakers.

Meeks will be considering the alternatives who have qualified or have submitted signatures to qualify for the state’s ballot, among them Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate; Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party; or a new organization, Better for America, that was started by John Kingston, a conservative donor and Mitt Romney ally. It hasn’t selected a candidate yet.

Like Meeks, Bell is surveying his options but will probably vote for Johnson. He’s imagined the various scenarios where someone besides Trump or Clinton is elected. Remember, the president is elected by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. The map favors Clinton, so the key for a third party candidate is to keep her from winning 270 electoral votes. Johnson would have to win New Mexico, where he was a Republican governor, and a few other states, including Utah, which normally votes Republican but where Trump isn’t popular. A poll by utahpolicy.com found Johnson’s support in that state rising to 16 percent.

So it’s at least imaginable that Johnson wins enough states that no candidate wins the required 270 votes. Under the Constitution’s 12th Amendment, the next president then would be selected by the House of Representatives, with each state having one vote. In that scenario, maybe some kind of coalition develops and the House picks Johnson. Meeks imagines a similar possibility, with the Senate picking a Democrat as vice president to balance the ticket.

The other possibility is that a politician with a national stature – Ohio Gov. John Kasich or Romney – runs under the Better for America banner, Bell said. Ohio has 18 electoral votes and is a critical swing state.

These scenarios are highly unlikely but possible. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but didn’t win a majority of electors, and the House chose John Quincy Adams.

Of course, what probably will happen is either Clinton or Trump wins more than 270 votes. More likely it will be Clinton, while Trump wins Arkansas while supported – enthusiastically or not – by almost all of the state’s Republican elected officials.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Unless Arkansas somehow becomes competitive in the presidential race, which it probably won’t, the state’s airwaves won’t be crammed with political advertising by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pity our unfortunate fellow Americans in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida for that one. In Arkansas, the only race between candidates that might be mildly interesting is the one for U.S. Senate.

What we will have is a pretty good three-way debate about medical marijuana.

Arkansans likely will have two choices on their ballot: the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act and the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment. The act has already qualified, while the amendment is in the process of doing so.

Both would legalize marijuana for medicinal use, but they differ in substantive ways. The act would have the force of law, while the amendment alters the Arkansas Constitution, a more permanent statement. The act includes about 50 ailments for which marijuana could be prescribed; the amendment lists 14. Both would set up a network of dispensaries where patients could obtain the product, but the amendment’s would be for-profit enterprises while the act’s would be run by nonprofits. Only the act includes a provision allowing patients living too far from a dispensary to grow their own.

That last provision is the reason there are two ballot proposals. The leaders of the two groups,
the act’s Melissa Fults and the amendment’s David Couch, worked together in 2012 to convince voters to legalize medical marijuana and almost succeeded. Since then, they’ve split over “grow your own,” which Couch says Arkansans won’t accept. The split does not appear to be amicable.

Meanwhile, a campaign is forming to oppose both groups. On July 22, the Coalition for Safer Arkansas Communities held an informational meeting at the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce. The coalition will include law enforcement personnel, educators, medical providers and others. Gov. Asa Hutchinson is opposed to the legalization efforts, as is the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Greg Bledsoe. The State Chamber is opposed because it says medical marijuana will complicate workplace safety enforcement efforts and worker’s compensation claims.

The main speaker at the meeting was Henny Lasley, a Little Rock native now living in Colorado, which legalized marijuana medically in 2000 and recreationally in 2012. Now, she says, youth marijuana use in Colorado is the highest in the nation. There are more marijuana stores in Denver than pharmacies, Starbucks, or McDonald’s. Hundreds of marijuana products – including all kinds of fun-looking foods – are for sale in that state. She and Dr. Bledsoe say that, far from being harmless, marijuana is a dangerous plant with long-term effects and far higher concentrations of the mind-altering THC compound than it contained in the past.

Lasley said that all of the four states, plus D.C., where marijuana is now legal recreationally originally legalized it medically. She and the coalition’s campaign manager, Terry Benham, say the medical marijuana efforts are just Trojan horses hiding the marijuana industry’s true intentions, full-scale legalization.

Fults and Couch say this is not a Trojan horse. They say marijuana ought to be an option for doctors and patients in some circumstances, such as cancer and epilepsy, and that the Food and Drug Administration is dragging its feet on studying the drug for political reasons, including the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. Medical marijuana is now legal in 25 states plus D.C., but legal recreationally in only four states plus D.C., so most states have not followed Colorado’s lead in expanding its use.

This campaign, like many, will come down to images – the kind voters see on television and the internet, and the kind they see in their heads. What comes to your mind with the words “medical marijuana”? A cancer patient or an epileptic getting a little relief, or a teenager getting his hands on a now-available gateway drug? Do you see a small network of dispensaries responsibly providing a plant to a few who can benefit from it? Or do you see marijuana stores popping up on Main Street?

If you’re not sure, campaigns will be trying to help you form those images, one way or the other. This is an election, after all.