Electoral Reform committee  I'll give a blunt answer. The first answer is that I don't know, because to answer that question I would want to get high-quality survey data to try to find out why different people voted for things. As a technical matter, when we vote for candidates in an election, it's not li

Electoral Reform committee  That's a non-traditional referendum. Usually there's one proposal put forward and people vote yes or no. If that wasn't on the table, then the status quo...that dynamic would not be present. Then it would be more like a candidate campaign, where you have ostensibly two new people

Electoral Reform committee  At the local level this is happening; at the state level—

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not sure I understand the question, sorry.

Electoral Reform committee  There's no precedent for that in the United States, but worldwide there are different types of referenda. The situation you've described is quite rare, that you enact the change and then ask for a vote later. What's more common is that you would have an advisory referendum. First

Electoral Reform committee  We have tens of thousands of municipal governments. I'm just not familiar with all of them.

Electoral Reform committee  Worldwide, most referenda are one-off affairs. You announce a certain date, you have a vote, and then that's the end of it. In some cases, people will revisit it later on, but it's not a planned revisitation. In some U.S. states, however, including Massachusetts and some of the

Electoral Reform committee  In terms of campaigning, the “no” campaign always has the advantage if they can make their case well, because if you vote no, you continue with something known. At the time of the campaign, “yes” is an imaginary thing. Yes is this virtual world, this thing that has to be describe

Electoral Reform committee  The true answer to your question is that I don't know, just because of the thousands of local jurisdictions we have. I don't know about all of them. I know that at the state level, there is a tendency, in half of the states, if you want to amend the state constitution, to go thro

Electoral Reform committee  As a general matter, you can have referenda where there's nothing spent, then you can have huge amounts spent. In the insurance case that you referenced earlier, that was amazing, because there were five different referenda to reform the insurance industry on the ballot in one st

Electoral Reform committee  No.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Here's what's empirical. If you look at referenda around the world, particularly national referenda, and a year out or on the initial date that you announce you're going to put this on the ballot you look at what percentage is voting “yes”, in almost all cases what happens i

Electoral Reform committee  There's a lot of variance worldwide in turnout in referenda. If a referendum is phrased in a way that people see it as vital to their day-to-day life, they can easily imagine what a “yes” vote means to them and their families and what a “no” vote means. They can feel it, right? T

Electoral Reform committee  It's difficult to treat a candidate-based election or a Parliament-based election as a referendum on a specific issue. Typically, in one of those elections, you're talking about a basket of issues. Some people when they go to the polls are really worried about the economy. Some m

Electoral Reform committee  You know, I'll answer the question, but one of the reasons I'm hesitating right now is that it depends on the relative numbers of these three groups, and that's not constant. In a situation where you have a clearly stated question and you have leaders of political parties or inte