Add up what the candidates spent to compete in Tuesday’s election: $1,301,763.61. That’s for mayor and three of the five seats on the city commission.
It doesn't include the two minor candidates for mayor. Their reports would have skewed the totals wildly, since one of them, Raphael Herman, reports over $5 million in expenditures himself, though almost all of that was money he lent the campaign and then paid it back to himself (I’ve read). I don’t want to disparage Mr. Herman (I’ve read that he’s a former Israeli commando – Kadima!), so I’ll just say that this sort of thing comes with the territory.
My mailbox filled up with them some days, and there’s a pile of 47 mailers now on my dining table – probably $50 there in money spent on me. I told one of the candidates to take me off the list, since he had my vote wrapped up. Too much trouble, so in fact I got dupes of most items from him – musta been on two of his lists.
What’s the bottom line on this? The number of people who voted was 9,971, so it cost $130.55 per vote. All the churning and campaigning attained turnout of 25.15 percent.
Isn’t that kind of high, my friends? What can we do about this in a land of free speech -- where the Supreme Court has ruled that money has freedom of speech?
If we aim for public financing of elections, what would that mean to the industry of clever people who lead and mislead voters to choose their candidates? If we cut the legs out from under the next Karl Rove by nixing his career, will free speech survive? Would we be better off without Karl Rove AND free speech?
Elections lead to dangerous thoughts.
This link takes you to the Miami Beach city clerk's site with campaign treasurers' reports.UPDATE: And this one is the SunPost's exhaustive report on election night events all over the Beach.
EVEN MORE: Now the Miami Herald's p.1 story asking why we don't have all the elections at the same time, instead of all over the calendar.
2 comments:
So much of voter communications is wasted, particularly because the voter does not request or want it.
Most useless are the automated phone calls or robo calls.
We are working to fight robo calls.
Shaun Dakin
The National Political Do Not Contact Registry
http://www.stoppoliticalcalls.org/index.php
And do you know about the robo call technology that wants only to leave a message on your voicemail? If you pick up the phone it hangs up immediately. This may explain those calls you get and no one is there.
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