TKC EXCLUSIVE!!! KANSAS CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE HENRY KLEIN TAKES ON LOW VOTER TURNOUT!!!

Just got a hold of an interesting missive from Kansas City Mayoral Candidate Henry Klein, it's a presser with ideas about improving community engagement and voter turnout in Kansas City. So far, most politicos haven't really addressed the problem because it's part of what has made them so powerful.

A direct quote from Klein on the topic:

"A mayor's job ought to be cultivating and mentoring our next leaders. And that's where new appointments will make such a difference. Today, so often it looks more like appointments are based either on some kind of patronage or some other kind of insider play. So very often with the same "players."

In this next passage, Klein seems to be taking a shot at Mayor Funky's Town Halls that get a lot of praise for meetings where very few folks really participate.

Klein says:

"Please also take a look at our ideas for town halls. The real meaning behind a town hall was to bring people together to jointly discuss and solve problems. What we are left with now is a one person centric show that loses the meaning behind what a town hall meeting should be. Lets let our citizens be the stars of these meetings rather than our elected officials.

Without significantly greater participation, too often we will either fail to address our issues or get solutions that work for just the insiders."

To wit, here's the presser:

GETTING VOTERS ENGAGED – A big problem with a simple solution

Kansas City, December 15, 2010. Today the Klein Campaign announces new ideas to deal with Kansas City's extremely low voter participation percentages in municipal elections.

“If you had to pick a day in the year where you wanted the lowest possible voter participation, February 22nd would be that day,” said Mayoral Candidate Henry Klein. After a major election, such as the 2010 midterms, voters tend to have election fatigue. In addition, there are no other races in conjuntion with the mayoral primary race. Weather also plays a role here; winters in Kansas City can be unkind. We should pick a day to work with our voters instead of against them. Many want to say that low voter participation, commonly below 20-25% in municipal elections, is actually the fault of the voters but with so many factors working against our citizens and several reasonable ways to address these factors – the better answer is our elected leaders need to make some changes.

The Klein Campaign proposes the following -
1) Move the days of both the primary and the run-off to voting days that are known to get higher voter turnout. "Analysis of local participation indicates that a small change to local election timing - a reform that is cost effective and relatively easy to enact - could dramatically expand local voter turnout."*

2) Explore ways to allow voters to vote either by mail or even the internet (with appropriate safety measures)

3) Create a directory on kcmo.org of qualified candidates and links to their websites for voters to learn more about the candidates via the city's website. Currently there is no easy way to find out even who is running and how to learn more about them

4) Have 8-10 Town Hall meetings per year that are citizen centric rather than one person centric. These Town Halls would be based on specific topics and likely encourage certain groups to participate (either by region, interest, etc.). The Mayor would act more as moderator in an effort to encourage our citizens to not only ask questions but provide answers. “I think we'll be amazed at the range and depth of solutions to problems if we tap into citizen's views in a more systematic, participation friendly way,” Klein said.

5) Committee promotion of new leaders with new ideas with a 50% threshold. For non-council mayoral committee appointments, each committee will be made up of more than half that are new to committee assignments. The goal is to create new leaders for our city's future. “Ideally," Klein said, "I hope to well exceed the 50% threshold.”

The question has to be asked; why haven’t our elected leaders done anything about this? “When voter participation in municipal elections has remained so low for so long, something is wrong with the system. This situation has only gotten worse in the last 4 and even 8 years. It's time we quit blaming the voters and look at the system,” Klein said.

Klein continued by saying, “I can't stress enough that addressing the issues we face as a city can either remain as difficult and intractable as they have been or we can get more of our citizens involved, both on the voter and committee level, which in turn opens us up to better ideas and solutions for our city.


Footnote:
* Source: America's Uneven Democracy by Zoltan Hajnal, Cambridge University Press

###################