Spina's Idea Worth Risking Ballot Fatigue

By TOM JACKSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 4, 2008

Upon discovering Steve Spina's utterly reasonable and, quite likely, overdue suggestion about moving Pasco's municipal elections from springtime to November, one question immediately muscled countless others aside.

No, not, "Spina? The Zephyrhills city manager? Didn't he retire?" No. He reconsidered. Perhaps you were absent from the news that day, the way Barack Obama always was absent when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright went off on the nation his ambitious parishioner hopes to lead. It happens.

No, the poser brandishing lethal elbows is: What about "ballot fatigue"? You know, when the list of candidates and issues stretches so far even Ironman triathletes collapse into quivering pools of sweat and drool before completing their voting assignment.

Just Accept It, It's True

This gruesome malady is, like the hypothesis behind man-made global warming, little understood and elusively demonstrated, neither of which impair its reputation as Received Truth. Unchecked, ballot fatigue could submerge the republic.

In 2003, for instance, county commissioners found the scenario of voters reduced to protoplasm on the floors of precincts countywide sufficiently nightmarish to shift the Penny-for-Pasco referendum from the 2004 general election to the previous February's Democratic presidential primary.

And that was back in the early days of the easy, breezy iVotronic touch-screen machines, the famously goof-proof devices that were so effortless, they practically voted for you. (Which, of course, was precisely what just enough conspiracy mongers believed and had them fomenting to get them, and their failure to produce a paper receipt, decertified.)

Now we'll be filling in little bubbles to designate our choices for candidates and referenda, a maximum-effort task that may require the stationing of EMS personnel at each and every polling place even without the addition of municipal races.

To The Finish Line - And Beyond!

What in the name of Gabriele Andersen-Scheiss is Spina thinking? (Oh, come on: Gabriele Andersen-Scheiss, whose tortured final lap around the Los Angeles Coliseum track in the first women's Olympic marathon in 1984 survives in legend as the triumph of will over exhaustion. Municipal voters facing daunting election days can catch her inspirational finish on YouTube.)

"If there's a 50 percent turnout for the general election," Spina explains, "and we lose 10 percent, that's still 40 percent voting in the city election."

This is not insignificant. The feverish specter of ballot exhaustion notwithstanding, resolving municipal campaigns on general election days would almost certainly result in voter-participation surges five to eight times higher than the April turnouts.

As Spina rightly notes, "When only about 8 percent vote, that's not much of a mandate for governing."

The trade-off - enhancing the legitimacy of local city councils and commissions - plainly balances the risk to humanity.

Certain bugs beg solutions, such as, with elected city officials serving overlapping two-year terms, what happens in the odd-numbered years when there are no federal or state elections to drive voters? Also, with municipal campaigning out of the mix, what will This Space do for material from February to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in April?

Perhaps the answer to both is: We'll figure it out. In the honorable interest of legitimizing the work of city boards, it's the least we can do.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.