On May 11th, the City sponsored a public referendum seeking citizen approval of a $22,500,000 bond issue to fund park and recreation improvements for the community. Voters turned down to referendum 57% to 43%.
Since then, we (i.e. – City staff) have been asking ourselves the question: Why did this referendum fail? And the follow-up: How could we redesign the package of improvements in such a way that citizens would approve it?
To be sure, everyone has an opinion about these two questions. But we’d like to know with a bit more scientific precision what the best answers are, so we have begun the process of soliciting public opinion consultants to provide us with some data. As we have been proceeding down this line we have run into an issue that tugs at the fundamentals of the secret ballot. I’d like to pose it to my readers and solicit your feedback.
One way to do this survey is to get a printout of the names of those Eden Prairie citizens who voted in the referendum. You can get this list from the County. Voting is a public act. The fact that you vote is a public record. Who you vote for is a secret. It really is. We could get this list of names and then use it as the pool of people that we would survey. The thought is that by polling those people who actually voted, the results of the polling would be more telling to us as we decided how, or if, to proceed with a future referendum along similar lines.
We could, of course, do the same survey with a random draw of citizens. Some of them would have voted in the referendum, but because our voter turn-out was only 16%, my guess is that most of those polled in a random sample would be non-voters. I’m not sure if this information would be as valuable as the information drawn from the first scenario. I might be wrong about this. I’d be interested in feedback on this too.
Now how does all of this sound to you? Does it sound too intrusive for a polling consultant working for the City to call you, for example, and say “I know that you voted in the last election, now can you tell me why you voted the way that you did?” The pollster would likely be a bit more polished than that, but that would be the basic question.
We are seeking this information to build a more a supportable public policy option for our citizens to once again (perhaps) consider at a future referendum. Is that sufficient justification for potentially pushing the sanctity of your secret ballot?
That’s what I want to know.
