Institute leader Sam Blakeslee and Cal Poly professor Michael Latner hosted Phillip Ung from California Common Cause, John Cox from the Rescue California Educational Foundation and moderator Dan Schnur from the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.
Benjy Egel
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Cal Poly’s Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy gathered six leading political minds in the Christopher Cohan Performing Arts Center on Oct. 11 to discuss solutions to California’s political problems.
Students and community members came to the seminar, which had previously been conducted at University California, Berkeley, University of Southern California (USC) and California State University, Sacramento.
Institute leader Sam Blakeslee and Cal Poly professor Michael Latner hosted Phillip Ung from California Common Cause, John Cox from the Rescue California Educational Foundation and moderator Dan Schnur from the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.
“Young people should be very, very interested in this,” Cox said. “You’re about to join a workforce and pay taxes in a state that has a $1 trillion difference between its assets and its funding obligations.”
Blakeslee also interviewed political donor Charles Munger, Jr., whose father is Warren Buffett’s investing partner.
While Munger made no effort to disguise his allegiance to the Republican Party, he gave California Democrats credit where it was due, such as their ability to win debates against other party members.
After funding, fighting and losing Propositions 30 and 32 last November, Munger said he was too taxed to make another activism push in the near future, despite winning with Proposition 40.
“A deeply honorable thing, but some of us wish to go back to our fields,” Munger said. “My view of the state Republican Party is in the last six years, it’s essentially been AWOL.”
Despite Munger’s deep pockets, he said he had fought to make money less relevant in state elections. One of his reforms would make it illegal for corporations and unions to take money from employees’ paychecks for political donations.
Though Republicans lost seats in the state legislature in the last election, Blakeslee said the new Democrats were willing to think outside party lines on certain issues.
“Parties need to be pushed. They need to be willing to expand,” Blakeslee said. “There’s been a lot more discussion, both among Republicans and Democrats, on how to put together solutions that speak to a larger California.”
Cal Poly picked Blakeslee as the Institute’s founding director on Oct. 9, two years after he declined to run again for his State Senate seat.
Ung spoke about California Common Cause’s efforts to rework the ballot system, including a public review period where voters can comment on proposals’ language before they go out for signatures.
California Common Cause is rewriting the state’s ballot measure booklet to make it simpler and allow voters to become better informed, Ung said. Even he couldn’t understand some legislative speech in the current booklet.
Cox’s plans were more radical. He wanted to follow New Hampshire’s neighborhood legislature model, with more part-time representatives.
California’s neighborhood legislature would have one state assembly representative per 5,000 people and one state senator per 10,000.
Each group of 100 elected officials would then vote for one member to represent the area in Sacramento. The new model would result in 12,000 legislative officials.
Cox hopes the new format would stop people and corporations from piling money into campaigns and would encourage door-to-door precinct walking.
“You can try and run a TV campaign in a district of 5,000 people, but guess what? I’m going to run against you by just going door to door,” Cox said. “If you’re in a district of only 5,000 people, your vote will matter.”
Latner was concerned with California’s recent redistricting. Realigned districts promoted competitive elections, but such elections usually go to the state’s dominant party, which is the Democratic Party in California.
He rebutted Cox’s plan by proposing 16 larger districts in the assembly, with five representatives per district. More land covered would result in greater political diversity, he said.
“If you live in a district where you’re the political minority, your vote simply doesn’t count,” Latner said. “What you would produce is real competition for leadership.”
The same redistricting Latner balked at was one of the main reasons behind Blakeslee’s refusal to run for re-election in 2012, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported.
Blakeslee compared politics to game theory because the rules implemented directly lead to future outcomes. For example, donation limits make politicians rely on other innovative forms of advertising.
Some Cal Poly computer science students are working with Blakeslee to create a political search engine where people could easily look up videos of speeches and debates.
“The democratization of the political process is within our reach if we take the best and the brightest minds and apply them to civic engagement,” Blakeslee said.
Blakeslee proposed to ban fundraising while California’s legislature is in session to prevent wealthy benefactors from dropping loads of cash right before an important decision.
Aerospace engineering sophomore Noah Falk and political science senior Christopher Nielson asked the panel questions during the “town hall” portion of the event.
Falk wanted to know if there are rules on how much time legislators must spend in their home districts. Blakeslee said it is up to each elected official, though some move to the state capital upon election.
“Different representatives conduct themselves and discharge their services differently,” Blakeslee said. “There are a number of individuals who bought homes and moved to Sacramento and pretty much never came home.”
Nielson asked why the government allows out-of-state corporations to donate to California races. No restrictions are in place because large businesses could easily establish partial residency in state, Ung said.