At this point, the democratic process hardly means a damn thing in Michigan.
Because no matter what the will of the people might be, the state legislature will find a way around it.
As you may have heard, the State Senate has approved a House bill that would end straight-ticket voting in the state of Michigan. Which isn't exactly the worst thing to happen; 41 other states also eliminated the practice, and it's hard to argue that anything that forces voters to look more closely at who they vote into office is inherently a bad thing.
But in this case, the devil's in the details. Namely in a $5 million appropriation added onto the bill that would render it unable to ever be repealed by voters via referendum. The State House had also tie-barred another bill to it that would have called for no-reason absentee voting, but Sen. Majority Leader Arlen Meekhof made clear that the Senate would remove that tie-bar, which they did by a 20-17 vote. The House has yet to approve the bill without said tie-bar, but most signs would seem to indicate that they will.
Now, I'm not here to argue that eliminating straight-ticket voting is a bad thing in and of itself. Naturally, as most liberals in the state believe that it disenfranchises Democratic voters in more liberal urban areas by causing longer lines at the polls, many of them stand staunchly against the bill. Yet, seeing how GOP lawmakers in Kansas are trying to reintroduce straight-party voting as they feel it will give them the advantage, that point seems hardly a given. And I'm not concerned at all as to which party gains the advantage on this; after all, how else could Todd Courser have won by as much as he did in 2014, if not for straight-ticket voting?
What is rather infuriating about the process, however, is that lawmakers, knowing that similar bills have twice been passed by the legislature and twice been repealed by voters, have made this law essentially democracy-proof. Under the state Constitution, any bill passed containing any sort of financial appropriation is no longer subject to voter referendum, meaning that voters in Michigan can never overturn it if passed. This has been a popular tactic by the Republican legislature when passing bills they know voters will find unfavorable; we saw it earlier this year with the attempt at no-fault "reform," before that with the emergency manager law, and with the right-to-work(-for-less) legislation that was passed.
It's also hard to argue against cries of voter suppression when the Senate goes out of its way to remove the one protection this bill had against vote suppression. No-reason absentee voting would have at least alleviated the wait at the polls for those who, for whatever reason (and quite frankly, the reason shouldn't matter), can't make it to their polling station on election day, and the concerted effort to deny that only gives credence to claims that this is purely a political ploy by the party in power in order to retain that power.
Furthermore, this sort of tactic only proves the point that those currently in charge in Lansing care not in the slightest for the opinions of their constituents. The insistence on ramming through the same road bill that voters soundly rejected earlier this year should have been proof enough in itself that no matter what the people want, it will be soundly ignored by those who claim to represent you.
Despite their best efforts, however, that still doesn't have to be the case. And the voters of this state need to make their voice heard, the only way that any politician seems to understand these days.
Unfortunately, that might mean an extra few minutes out of your day next November.
But that should be a sacrifice worth making to send the message to Lansing about who truly holds the power here.
