Florida voters will face tortured calculations thanks to ‘bundling’ | Our view

Treasure Coast Newspapers Editorial Board Published 2:32 p.m. ET April 26, 2018 | Updated 8:51 a.m. ET April 27, 2018

What do offshore drilling and vaping have in common?

Nothing.

Unless you’re the Florida Constitution Revision Commission.

This 37-member body, which is recreated every 20 years to review and update the state’s governing document, arbitrarily decided there is, in fact, a relationship between these two disparate issues.

As a result, commissioners voted to couple a proposed constitutional amendment to ban oil drilling in state waters with another to prohibit vaping in enclosed indoor workplaces.

Voila! The two have become one.

Consequently, when voters go to the polls in November, they will be asked to vote “yea” or “nay” on one proposed constitutional amendment containing two unrelated ideas (i.e., offshore drilling and vaping).

If you think that’s bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. Offshore drilling/vaping actually is the least egregious example of the commission’s “handiwork.”

Commissioners approved eight amendments that will go on the November ballot. Only three — a prohibition on dog racing; stricter ethical standards for lobbyists and elected officials; and removal of obsolete provisions in the state constitution — are clear and deal with stand-alone issues.

The other five are the result of disparate proposals that have been bundled together. Each is murky and ambiguous, and will necessitate a tortured calculation by voters in the polling booth. These include:

A proposal combining term limits for school board members with another mandating civics education and a third proposal that would change the governance of charter schools.

A proposal that couples anew voting requirement for university and college boardsof trustees to raise fees with another to provide death benefits to survivors of first responders and military members.

A proposal requiring the establishment of the Office of Domestic Security and Counterterrorism within the Department of Law Enforcement is coupled with another requiring some counties to elect certain officers who currently are appointed.

Say what?!

When citizens initiate a proposed constitutional amendment, it must be limited to a single subject. The Constitution Revision Commission operates under a different set of rules. Florida law allows the commission to “bundle” proposals together. While some commissioners contend bundling helps alleviate “ballot fatigue” — i.e., the proliferation of proposals on the ballot — it most certainly precipitates “ballot confusion.”

Bob Martinez, a litigation attorney from Coral Gables and member of the Constitution Revision Commission, urged his colleagues to abandon the “bundling” approach and place only single-issue proposals on the ballot.

“Bundling will confuse the voters, causing them to spend more time in the voting booth merely to understand each summary within a group and its relation to the others,” Martinez wrote in an April 13 letter to commissioners.

“That will prolong the time in the voting booth, causing the very problem that the groups were presumably intended to eliminate.”

Martinez’s motion, introduced prior to the bundling fiasco, was defeated.  The bundling of loosely related (or completely unrelated) proposals by the commission is asinine and counterproductive to the purpose of this state organization.

Bundling has no place in Florida’s ballot process.

Unless the commission abandons this approach in the future — and puts only single-subject issues on the ballot — there’s really no point in subjecting Floridians to the dog-and-pony show that is the Constitution Revision Commission.

https://www.tcpalm.com/story/opinion/editorials/2018/04/26/florida-voters-face-tortured-calculation-thanks-bundling-our-view/550075002/

Editorials of Treasure Coast Newspapers/TCPalm are decided collectively by its Editorial Board. To respond to this editorial in a letter to the editor, email up to 300 words to TCNLetters@TCPalm.com.