Word: ballotting
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Outside a Target store in Orange County, California, Elbie Birch hawks his wares: ballot propositions. "Excuse me, gentlemen, are you registered voters?" Birch, a tall, burly man with a shaved head, goatee and winning smile, is a professional initiative-signature gatherer. In the past year, he has worked on gerrymandering in Florida, a casino issue in Ohio and affordable housing in Massachusetts before coming to California - the undisputed capital of direct democracy - where he is hustling a stack of nine ballot initiatives. Birch gets 50 cents to $1 for every signature he gathers...
...states such as California, Colorado and Oregon, it is hard to think about politics and government without speaking about ballot initiatives - some of which can come crashing down on a state capitol like a tsunami. The so-called Progressive Era in U.S. history (from the 1880s to the 1920s) bestowed the secret ballot and direct elections for the U.S. Senate and the city manager, as well as the initiative, the referendum and the recall. The latter, of course, transformed Arnold Schwarzenegger the movie star into Arnold the Gubernator when the actor became California governor after voters chose to recall Democrat...
...confusion on many of the initiatives. "I never know what to do. I think representative government is a good thing, but I am one of the few." Angie Sim, 37, likes the tax measures. "Less taxes are better for me." Jessica Moore, a junior in college who supports "green" ballot measures, says, "They push you to sign the initiative, but they don't tell you everything. I think the special interests control the initiative process...
Still, politicians should take the calls for term limits as a barometer of how unhappy the public is with the job they're doing. Once more, term limits has become a rallying cry from the Tea Party movement to dozens of state initiatives that will be on the ballot come November...
...Barack Obama and his special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, who view the promotion of elections as a cornerstone of Western foreign policy. The belief that liberty and equality "are chiefly to be found in democracy," as Aristotle wrote, is thousands of years old. But Western faith in the ballot box can sometimes seem blind and naive. Elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe have been accompanied by deadly violence. In 2006, an election in the Palestinian territories brought to power the Islamist militants of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.S. (See the world's most influential people...