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Zero Votes Cast in City Council Election

If you have ever wondered what would happen if we had an election where no one actually voted, we will no longer need to wait for the result.

This situation became reality yesterday in the town of Missouri City, Missouri when none the 35 registered voters in Ward 3 — including the incumbent himself — bothered to go the polls and vote. Ward 3 incumbent Joe Selle, who apparently forgot that there was an election yesterday, will still be allowed to serve another term on the city council even though no one voted for him due to an archaic city charter that was originally approved by the Missouri state legislature back in 1859. According to the charter, the incumbent gets to keep his office unless “another party is successfully elected and qualified”.

Interestingly, this same charter requires that the city’s mayor be a “free white male”. However, the City Council, citing modern civil rights legislation, decided to override this requirement in 2001 when the town elected its first female mayor.

Meanwhile, Michael Hampton at Homeland Stupidity made an excellent point a few days ago about how a small party or even a single person can still make a difference when it comes to elections and politics. In this particular case, all that was required for the removal of this incumbent was for one person to write in the name of another legally qualified resident of that district. These are the kinds of situations where we Libertarians can rack up some easy victories and begin to make a real difference at the local level if we can learn to recognize these opportunities and put forth a small amount of effort.

Yet at the same time, I also wonder about the folks who see voter apathy and intentional non-voting as a viable strategy for reducing the power of the State. After all, if we have reached the point where politicians cannot even be bothered to vote for themselves, do we really need these politicians?

UPDATE 8/27/08: It seems that the original story from KMBC-TV has been deleted, rendering the original link useless. I have managed to find a truncated version of the article from Associated Press here.

Yesterday, while checking out one of my regular blog sites, I ran across a link to a short (about 2 minutes long), humorous but scary movie apparently titled “Pizza” and produced by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

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Although President George W. Bush called on Congress to reduce the size and number of pork barrel projects (known officially as “earmarks” in Congressional terminology) in his last State of the Union address, the actual costs to taxpayers of pork-related Congressional spending are not really being reduced.

Pork barrel projects are pieces of legislation that are inserted into larger bills and “earmark” federal dollars for various local projects and personal interests that are unrelated to the actual subject of the bill. Although much of the American public remains unaware, the true purpose of these earmarks is to allow politicians to “bring home the bacon” to their local Congressional districts in order to curry favor with voters and increase their chances of being re-elected.

In an apparent move to appease government watchdogs and other concerned members of the public, Congress has pretended to do something about the increasing costs of pork barrel spending by having the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a federal database of earmarks that is now being made available to the public. On the surface, this looks like a good thing for those of us who are concerned about the increasing costs of pork and its contribution to the national debt. But then we get to the last two sentences of their latest report:

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Although the agency has denied it for years, recently discovered documents confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the Secret Service and other government agencies with much more specific information on Americans of Japanese descent than was previously thought.

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In an encouraging development for libertarian feminists, the Libertarian Party of Wake County, North Carolina held their annual convention last Thursday and elected women to fill all four of the officer posts (chair, vice-chair, secretary, and treasurer). Interestingly, my local (formerly male) LP county chair in Nueces County, Texas has also been replaced by a woman (Pamela Heisser). It appears that women who are developing an appetite for liberty are finally becoming fed up with the (mostly male) “armchair quarterback” Libertarians who like to sit on their butts and complain about the current state of affairs without actually doing anything to advance the goals of the party.

Kudos go to Susan Hogarth at HammerOfTruth.net for reporting on this story.

UPDATE 8/27/08: The link to Hammer of Truth now resolves to a domain parking page, so I have had to remove it. The Libertarian Party of North Carolina is still alive and well, however.