MINING NEWS: We’re awash in political skullduggery

Alaska’s initiatives process perennially disappoints as democratic lawmaking; system should be stripped from state constitution

J. P. Tangen

For Mining News

It is axiomatic that democracy as a form of government doesn’t work very well. If you doubt me, you should consider watching the television program “Survivor” sometime. In that show, a group of people are marooned in a desert location (along with a couple of hundred medical support staff, television producers, and aircraft pilots) for 39 days to decide who among them should be given $1,000,000.

One-by-one the players are voted out of the group until only two or three remain; then those who have been thrown off get to choose who of the remainder gets the prize.

Despite the contrived shenanigans, the underlying dynamic is that the group gets to make a decision and the TV-watchers of America get to cheer from the sidelines. Obviously, because the money does not go to the person watchers think deserves it, the democratic nature of the selection process is severely flawed.

We in Alaska are about to engage in our own version of Survivor, or perhaps it should better be called ballot-box roulette, because we will probably be called upon in August to vote on one or more initiatives relating to the future of the Pebble Copper deposit in southwest Alaska.

I have previously expressed my views on the content of the initiatives; therefore, I won’t try to pile Pelion on Ossa. But I do invite readers to look, not at the substance of the proposals, but at the procedure by which we attempt to make law in this state.

Procedurally, an individual or group that cannot persuade the best Legislature money can buy to lay a proposed law before the governor can recruit college kids and other unemployables to stand at random locations to gather signatures.

Those endorsing the petition don’t have to support it, or understand it, or even read it. Those soliciting the signatures don’t have to be able to defend it or even tell the truth about it. In fact, the process distills to the number of signatures the solicitor can gather, irrespective of the means. Payday is based on the number of autographs or pseudo autographs collected. An ambitious solicitor will have five or more different petitions to maximize his (or her) per-encounter take.

Given that the collection process is inarguably fraught with deception, the next stage requires the signatures to be filtered to ensure that the minimum requisite number of actual voters participated in the process.

Proponents of the initiatives then get to have their proposal certified by the lieutenant governor and have it placed on the ballot for a public vote.

Prudence dictates that for any initiative process to be successful, it must be accompanied by an extensive publicity campaign explaining why the Legislature and the administration are doing their jobs so poorly that the entire process has to be turned over to the 20 percent or 30 percent of the general population that bothers to vote in off-elections such as primaries.

If the PR campaign is good enough, many of the same folks who didn’t know what they were signing when they walked into a local bookstore will remember to vote come the election.

With the pending initiatives, for instance, we have seen the signatures collected, frequently on false premises; the language of the proposed initiative challenged in the courts, not once but twice; and a cascade of mock Captain Kirks explain how the people of the state of Alaska should deal with an indolent Legislature and administration.

Anyone who believes this is a sound procedure for refining the Alaska social contract surely needs to give the process a second look.

The anti-Pebble proposals do not stand alone as the sole illustrations of bad law-making, but surely they have brought the system to a new depth of depravity. No matter how the current exercise is resolved, we now have good and sufficient reasons to ask the governor and Legislature to take a long hard look at whether the initiative process has any identifiable redeeming value.

Not for the substance of these initiatives, but because of the lack of need for this tool and the unending abuses it has engendered, I propose that the initiative process be stripped from the Alaska Constitution or outlawed. We simply don’t need it and are unlikely to need it in any conceivable scenario.