Opinion: RI voter handbook is biased against ballot Question 1

By now you should have received the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s 2024 Voter Information Handbook, as it was mailed to all registered voters before early voting started on Oct. 16. The Handbook includes an “explanation and purpose” of Question 1: Shall there be a convention to amend or revise the Rhode Island Constitution?

This ballot summary, paid for by taxpayers and written by a government official, is supposed to be objective. But it is biased against calling a convention because instead of merely explaining the question it takes the improper additional step of answering it by implying that a legislature can do anything a convention can at less cost and risk. It mimics three biases that convention opponents routinely make in their anti-convention advertising:

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First, it doesn’t explain the unique democratic function of the periodic constitutional convention referendum in Rhode Island’s Constitution.  Twenty-four American state constitutions provide the ballot initiative to allow the people to bypass the legislature. As an alternative legislature bypass mechanism adopted by 14 states, Rhode Island’s framers adopted the periodic constitutional convention referendum.

Accordingly, the ballot summary should have stated that the Rhode Island Constitution’s periodic convention referendum is the only way the people of Rhode Island can break the legislature’s monopoly gatekeeping power over constitutional amendment. The ballot summary also misleadingly implies that a convention’s − but not the legislature’s − constitutional amendment proposal power is unlimited, with the implication that such unlimited power is bad. But if a convention’s agenda could be limited by the legislature, it would be unable to fulfill its democratic function as a legislature bypass institution.

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Second, it lacks a simple explanation of the three public votes that constitute the convention process: 1) whether to call a convention, 2) if called, to elect convention delegates to propose constitutional amendments, and 3) whether to approve or disapprove each of the convention’s proposed amendments. Its focus on the first two votes supports its implicit narrative that a convention is riskier and less democratic than a legislature.

Third, it only attempts to quantify a convention’s potential costs, thus not only excluding its potential benefits but also violating Rhode Island “law.” It is standard practice in public policy analysis to provide a cost-benefit analysis, so only providing costs is clearly biased. In a submission to the secretary of state, I suggested one way to quantify benefits: estimate the break-even point for the percentage of government waste a convention would have to reduce to match its costs. Given the Rhode Island State Government’s $14-billion annual budget and $140-billion budget between convention referendums, a convention that reduced state government waste by only .1% (such as by mandating an independent inspector general, which the legislature has refused to do), would have a payback of 29,200% using the SOS’s highest convention cost estimate, $4.8 million. And this, mind you, when the public thinks that state government wastes 42% of every dollar spent.

I don’t endorse estimating either benefits or costs in a ballot summary because doing so requires heroic assumptions inappropriate for such a summary. But given the SOS’s insistence on providing a cost estimate, he should have balanced it with a benefit estimate. Cutting out the biased cost estimate would also have been consistent with the 2014 legal advice provided to the SOS by a former Rhode Island Supreme Court justice and the SOS’s own legal counsel. They argued that only Rhode Island bond measures should have cost information in their explanation. But no practical mechanism exists to enforce this law, and a law without an effective remedy isn’t really a law.

Surveys indicate that voter information handbooks provide the most used and by implication influential voter information on so-called low-information ballot measures such as the convention referendum. It’s sad, then, to see the SOS so recklessly abuse this power, even if he is not the first Rhode Island SOS to do so.

J.H. Snider is the editor of The Rhode Island State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse and author of the video “Question 1 – Constitutional Convention.”