“NO DO-OVERS!”
We used to yell that on the playground when we’d figure out the rules for a game of kick-ball. Playground etiquette demanded that the guy who brought the ball got to make the rules, and you can guarantee that at some point when he was chanting out the list of rules for the game, he’d end it with “no do-overs!” Kids understand that it’s not fair to give somebody two bites at the apple. You’re at the plate, you get one chance at the ball. If you screw up, you wait until it’s your turn to go again. That’s fair.
But in 18 states, including Wisconsin, that rule has been abandoned for political elections. Those states have adopted the recall election, where the people get a second chance if they think they’ve made a mistake and want to remove an elected official and replace them with another in mid-term.
As my colleague Ken Falkenstein has noted, yesterday was the recall election for six Republican state senators in Wisconsin. The GOP managed to stave off the attempted recalls in four of the races, with two races being lost. Ken attributes the loss in one to outside factors and the other to the political nature of the district. I don’t want to dismiss those two losses because I think they’re major blows – not to the GOP alone, but to democracy as a whole.
Recall elections are inherently anti-democratic devices. I don’t like them and I think, in general, they’ve been a destabilizing force in politics, not the populist power-to-the-people kind of force supporters claim them to be. While the recall concept has existed as early as ancient Greece, it didn’t spread in the United States until the Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even then, it has only made it to 18 states for state level elections. This same movement brought us the direct primary, the referendum, the ballot initiative and the 17th Amendment to the Constitution providing for direct election of Senators. Of all of them, recalls remain the most controversial. And for good reason.
Put simply, recalls are a bad idea. Elections are a big deal. We shouldn’t be handing out mulligans when voters decide they made a mistake. That’s what the next election is for.
Elections have to mean something. If not, they lose their importance. It’s difficult enough getting folks to focus on elections today, given the complexity of our lives in the early 21st century. If folks know they’ve got an out – that if an elected official really screws up they can just remove him at will, the desire to get it right the first time and elect the right person on election day fades away.
And, conversely, the willingness of the elected official to do the right thing, especially if doing the right thing is unpopular, drops off dramatically as well. It forces politicians to abandon their better judgment and simply vote for everything popular and make no hard choices. That kind of behavior has led, at the federal level, to bloated government and a mountain of debt. No politician is willing to say no to more spending or to say yes to a tax increase knowing that both are equally unpopular. And that’s right now – in a country where there are no recall elections at the federal level and only 18 states have adopted them at the local level. Can you imagine what would happen if we had recall elections for federal office? It would be election day every month. And you’d see paralysis of a worse kind than what we already have – you’ll have elected officials refusing to make even the easiest decisions without taking a poll first. That’s no way to run a railroad.
Regardless of whether the Wisconsin recall elections were justified – even for the guy who cheated on his wife – I would have preferred that none of them happen. Not for the Republicans and not for the Democrats. Instead, I want to see a greater attention paid by we, the voters, on who we choose to represent us. Nowadays, just getting voters to pay attention for a few seconds to an election is a difficult feat, something I can attest to from personal experience out campaigning. If we remove the only incentive folks have to getting things right – the fact that you’re stuck with your choice for at least a couple of years – we’re only going to make things worse, not better.
The loss of two Republicans to recall elections last night was a loss for democracy as a whole. And if Republicans are successful in recalling two Democratic Senators next week, that “success” is also a failure. Elections need to matter and they don’t when we give ourselves do-overs.
