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The fight for democracy

With voter apathy on the rise, Oregon activists look for ways to fix an ailing political system

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Jul 4, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

David Plechl / The Portland Tribune

Volunteers from Building Blocks, Building Votes get set to register young voters along Northeast Alberta Street on Last Thursday.

Parties lose ground

For Gordly, the numbers paint a disturbing picture. In 1950, fewer than 2 percent of Oregon’s registered voters did not affiliate with either party, or about 12,000 people. But by 2006, that portion was up to 25 percent – about a half a million people. That is a half a million Oregonians who did not identify with the two major political parties and the ones who control the direction of the state, Gordly says.

“They don’t feel an affinity to the political parties,” she says of the Independents. This is a problem, since “government is where decisions are made every day that affect the quality of everyone’s lives,” she says.

If the number reflects a statistical measure of disaffection, then Gordly now officially shares it. Why? Because Gordly says partisan battling between the two parties is preventing the state Legislature from tackling problems in Salem.

School funding is one example, with Oregonians treated to a new round of headlines about potential budget cuts every year, Gordly says.

During the 2005 session, two prominent politicians, state House Speaker Karen Minnis, a Republican, and Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, floated proposals to make funding more stable – proposals that were surprisingly similar. However, Gordly notes, each proposal promptly sank – in part due to partisanship.

“The minute these proposals came out, people began to attack them based on who made the proposals,” she says, “as opposed to looking at them on their merits.”

As a result, Gordly supports the idea of making elections for the entire Legislature nonpartisan, just as local races are. That way, she says, lawmakers would be better able to vote their conscience and tackle problems, without worrying about what their political party tells them to do.

Given the power and money of the major parties, Gordly’s decision to go Independent could mean an end to her career as an elected official. But she seems OK with that, saying simply: “What we have now doesn’t work.”

Focus moves to fringe issues

Keisling, a former secretary of state, shares Gordly’s concern. The two major parties have become the equivalent of an unbridgeable divide, like Sunni versus Shiite, he says.

Making politics more relevant to voters is key to bringing more of them to the ballot box, he says. But because so few people vote, the political parties increasingly address fringe issues, while avoiding the big problems facing society.

Keisling argues that part of the problem is that so many legislative and congressional districts are not competitive: One party is going to win, and as a result there is little reason for people in the other party to participate.

He is pushing a measure for the November ballot that would change Oregon to an open-primary system. That would mean that voters can vote for whomever they want, instead of allowing only registered Democrats to vote for Democrats. Keisling and state Sen. Ryan Deckert, D-Beaverton, have raised about $500,000 to gather signatures to put the measure on the ballot.

This, he says, will make politicians more often speak to issues that matter to people. If a group of Estonian observers had come over for the May primary, for instance, they would have felt that issues on Oregonians’ mind were tribal casinos as well as “who knew Neil Goldschmidt, and who is this guy Loren Parks?” says Keisling, referring to two controversial Oregon power brokers who factored into primary debates. The political discussion said virtually nothing about pressing issues such as the health care system, which, as a generation of baby boomers grows old, is “hurtling toward a cliff.”

This, in turn, erodes people’s faith in their elected leaders’ credibility and that the system is working for them.

Keisling now works for a high-tech firm, Hepieric Inc., which does business overseas, in places like Vietnam. He thinks potential voters know instinctively what he is seeing firsthand: Other countries’ governments are aggressively tackling issues like international competitiveness, and the U.S. is falling behind. The younger generation that is most affected by this is the one that is least involved, Keisling says: “If you’re under 30, the single biggest party affiliation is none of the above.”

Cause taken to the streets

It’s last Thursday, in a nondescript office building in Southeast Portland. Two dozen young people, mainly college students, gear up for a summer of registering voters as part of a nonpartisan project called Building Blocks, Building Votes. They introduce themselves and answer an icebreaker question: If you could date any politician in history, who would it be?

“I’d think I’d go for Erik Sten – he’s obviously dreamy,” says Britta Lundin, a senior at Reed College.

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