To close tolls, drive the info superhighway
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Boston Herald: Don’t forget the one positive result from last year’s doomed Question 1 referendum campaign to abolish the state income tax: It cost the hacks $7 million to defeat an $80,000 citizens initiative.
So I’m thinking maybe we could see a similar upside from this new campaign to abolish all the tolls in Massachusetts (including the ones at the harbor tunnels and on the Mystic Tobin bridge). Best case: Working people win, the tollbooths come down, and the connected Teamsters of Local 259 have to go out and get real jobs. Worst case: The hacks have to spend, oh, $5 million to beat back another shoestring campaign. What was that old bumper sticker in West Virginia the first time carpetbagger Jay Rockefeller ran for governor against a political warhorse named Arch Moore? “Make him spend it all, Arch!” So now you have this new group, Citizens Against Road Tolls (CART), and they’re proposing to run a new kind of ballot-initiative campaign - an Internet campaign. See, the toughest part of all these referendum questions is getting on the ballot. It takes 66,000 certified signatures from registered voters.
Not easy. You try sitting at a card table in a mall sometime for four or five hours, begging people to sign a petition. But what if you could post the petitions on the Internet and let everyone in the state who’s really fed up download ’em? Say you recruited 20,000 hardbars, and each of them got just a handful of signatures from their family, friends and co-workers. Take that, Jim Aloisi and Deval Patrick.
Could such an unorthodox signature-gathering campaign succeed? At this point, nobody knows. But what have we got to lose?
To read more, click here.
Comments
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