Asheville City Councilman Brownie Newman is being lobbied to change the way Asheville votes again. Council recently, and just in time for the next election, voted to change the city charter to make elections partisan. Counting Asheville, only ten of over 500 municipalities in North Carolina have partisan municipal elections.
In an unprecedented level of protest, the citizens of Asheville rose up and petitioned for a referendum to try to revert local elections to nonpartisan races. The filing date for partisan candidates is today, but the protest petition has not yet been certified. Unaffiliated candidates are in a limbo, not knowing if they should buy another pair of shoes to petition for the 2250 signatures they now need to get on the ballot after completing the collection of 5000 signatures to try to restore equal ballot access privileges for nonpartisans. Unaffiliated voters, incidentally, outnumber Republicans in Asheville, representing 22% of the total.
So, while that little bit of chaos tries to resolve itself, Newman wants council to look into instituting Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). Currently, Asheville voters can select their three favorite candidates to fill three vacant seats. The top vote-getters win. With IRV, Newman admits he is still unclear about how the system would be used for multiple seats. This is probably something council would make up as it goes along. In IRV, when multiple candidates are contending for a single seat, voters rank their choices. If a majority is not obtained, then the lowest vote-getter is eliminated and the second choices on the ballots of everybody who voted for the loser get thrown into the mix for recounting. The process continues until somebody gets over 50% of the vote.
IRV does not appear to be any fairer, but it might hold some advantage for Democrats who constitute 58% of Asheville voters.
Now, this would not be disconcerting had it not been for the fact that Asheville’s progressive city council has been changing rules on whimsies since seated in 2006. They began by unseating council’s lone conservative, Dr. Carl Mumpower, from the Transit Board because with six of seven votes they could. They also removed former Councilman Dr. Joe Dunn from the Airport Authority.
When Mumpower had been vice mayor, board appointments were straightforward. But when Holly Jones assumed the role of counting votes, nobody knew the difference between a plurality and a majority, nor did they want to learn. Numbers were so confusing, and revotes with different methods had to be reworked. What used to be a two-minute agenda item turned into half-hour ordeals.
Then, because Mumpower was the lone conservative, council could no longer enforce its rule about items going on the agenda with the support of three members from council. So, council decided to allow any item approved by the mayor and city manager. But items voted down kept resurfacing for new votes. Mumpower faulted his peers for not observing the rule to let votes stand for six months, and then his peers came back to say he was violating the rule in spirit if not to the letter.
And so we have a council that wants to mandate how many inches apart trees must be planted, their girth, and what percentage of a surface they must cover. They have even suggested making stricter UDO amendments apply retroactively. Comments made at a recent meeting suggested there were lawsuits or pending lawsuits for council’s arbitrariness and capriciousness.
One Unaffiliated candidate for city council has renounced his candidacy for being unwilling to jump through the hoops or wait with bated breath in a game of red-light-green-light with council’s whimsies. Developers who lack the connections to work the system don’t quite know what kind of whammies to expect from council after investing sums into plans that respect the rules du jour. Staying within the law in Asheville is like negotiating a skateboard obstacle course on a boat with a drunk driver.
