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Old 04-23-2012, 05:53 PM   #3591
First Lady
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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan View Post
Fair enough--but in that case, it's up to the government to put it to a referendum.

The "citizen's initiative" idea was first proposed as showing the grassroots credentials of the party. Then, later, when we all pointed out that this could mean initiatives on all sorts of nonsense, we were reassured that it was so difficult to get the requisite number of signatures that we needn't worry--we won't have to worry about any actual citizen's initiatives--the policy has a built-in obstacle that is designed to be very difficult to overcome.

That means two things: first, that obstacle is going to operate equally to prevent sensible and crazy "citizen's initiatives," and as a result we can't rely on it to bring about electoral reform. Second, it's clear that the whole idea amounts to lip service: Wild Rose doesn't actually want a whole bunch of citizen's initiatives--what they want is to be able to bolster their populist image, hoping that none of it will ever come to fruition because voters tend not to read the fine print.
There's a reason it's called citizen initiated referenda. The only reason party had to clarify was because the other parties twisted to something else.

I had missed the question, so thanks GPMatt for responding.

The Wildrose has many items under democratic reform, PR isn't one of them.

Generally, its not something that I've seen come up a lot. I don't think the demand is there yet.
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