Month: December 2023

In Arkansas, as in many other states, proposals for initiatives’ popular names and ballot titles must be submitted to the state AG’s office, which must evaluate them to make sure they fairly and accurately summarize the initiative’s legal effect. The AG’s office may then accept the popular name and ballot title, revise it, or reject it.

An Arkansas AG’s opinion released last week (No. 2023-108) rejects the following proposal:

Popular Name

An amendment to the Arkansas Constitution to conduct all elections by paper ballots containing inherent security features which protect the integrity and authenticity of an official ballot, with vote selections marked by hand using permanent ink placed directly on the ballot by the voter (except when otherwise required by federal law), permitting the counting of election day votes only after the polls close on election day, requiring the vote count to be verified by human intelligence before certification of the vote, requiring that all elections in this State be conducted by voters selecting only one candidate or issue per race with the winner determined by which candidate or issue receives the majority plus at least one vote of the total votes, preserving the special runoff system, ensuring that elections cannot be conducted in this state using an internet, Bluetooth, or wireless connection, and allocating funding to ensure free, fair, and secure elections.

Ballot Title

An amendment to the Arkansas Constitution that repeals Amendment 50, § 4 and amends Amendment 50, § 2 to remove the language that permits elections to be conducted by voting machines, modify the language of Amendment 50, § 2 as well as adding new sections to Amendment 50 which effectuate a policy and practice that all elections in this State must be conducted with paper ballots containing inherent security features designed to prevent unauthorized duplication, with vote selections marked by hand using permanent ink placed directly on the ballot by the voter in a manner which ensures the secrecy of the votes cast on the ballot and the anonymity of the voter casting the ballot, requiring that no election day votes be counted or tabulated before the close of the polls on election day, requiring that the tabulation of votes be verified by human intelligence before certification of the vote, requiring that all elections for government positions or issues in this State be conducted by voters selecting only one candidate or issue per race with the winner determined by which candidate or issue receives the majority plus at least one vote of the total votes, ensuring that elections cannot be conducted in this state using an internet, Bluetooth, or wireless connection, and allocating funding to ensure free, fair, and secure elections….

The AG gives several reasons for rejecting the proposed name and title (laid out in detail here), but here are some that struck me as especially interesting:

• “Human intelligence.” The popular name, the ballot title, and the text of the proposed measure all contain the phrase “human intelligence,” which the text defines as “the thought and physical process of a human being instead of the thought or process of a computer or an artificial intelligence.” This language is confusing because the meaning of “thought and physical process” are unclear. Does this mean a human cannot use any machine or computer, such as a calculator or Excel spreadsheet, to aid in his or her “thought and physical process”? The answer to this question would surely give voters “serious ground for reflection.” [Under Arkansas law, {sponsors cannot omit material from the ballot title that qualifies as an “essential fact which would give the voter serious ground for reflection.”}]

The answer is also important to determine which statutes would be supplanted by the amendment. For example, under A.C.A. § 7-5-602(c), paper ballots must be “run through an electronic vote tabulation device before a hand count is conducted.” And A.C.A. § 7-5-606 specifies the requirements for “exhibit marking devices and electronic vote tabulating devices.” Since your definition of the term “human intelligence” is unclear, I cannot ensure that the ballot title is not misleading….

• Secrecy of individual votes. Amendment 50, § 2 to the Arkansas Constitution currently requires that the secrecy of individual votes be maintained: “All elections by the people shall be by ballot or by voting machines which insure the secrecy of individual votes.” The text of your proposed amendment would repeal the secrecy requirement in Amendment 50, § 2. Section 6 of your proposed text would replace Amendment 50, § 2 with the following language, none of which maintains the current “secrecy of individual votes”: “All elections by the people in this State shall be by a paper ballot containing inherent security features which makes the paper ballot difficult to duplicate or counterfeit.” This repeal might also be read as having the effect of repealing the provision of Amendment 81 to our constitution that protects the secrecy of votes.

Yet your ballot title summarizes the proposed text as “ensur[ing] the secrecy of the votes cast on the ballot and the anonymity of the voter casting the ballot.” You appear to believe that the method of voting required by your text would itself ensure the secrecy of individual votes. That may be true. But since it is unclear to me whether you intend to remove the constitutional right to the secrecy of individual votes, I cannot ensure your ballot title is not misleading….

• Popular name length. The popular name—at 152 words—is longer than a typical popular name. It instead reads like a second ballot title. Although this alone is not misleading, you may wish to significantly shorten the popular name to better meet the purpose of popular names as described above.
• Partisan coloring language in the popular name. It is my opinion that your proposed popular name contains impermissible “partisan coloring” language when it uses the word “integrity.” The Arkansas Supreme Court has held that “partisan coloring” language is “a form of salesmanship” that “gives the voter only the impression that the proponents of the proposed amendment wish to convey of the activity represented by the words.” The word “”integrity,” as used in the popular name (i.e., “protect the integrity”), gives voters only the impression that the proponents of the proposed amendment wish to convey—a “[s]teadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code … being unimpaired; sound[].” To paraphrase the Arkansas Supreme Court, the “[voter] is entitled to form” his or her “own conclusions” on whether the proposed measure promotes integrity.
• Partisan coloring in the ballot title. It is my opinion that the ballot title also contains impermissible “partisan coloring” language when it uses the words “to ensure free, fair, and secure elections.” Such words, like a slogan, give voters only the impression that the proponents of the proposed amendment wish to convey— as if to vote otherwise is to ensure the opposite of those characteristics. Again, the “voter is entitled to form” his or her “own conclusions” on whether the proposed measure promotes elections that would be “”free, fair, and secure.” …
• Grammatical issues. Your ballot title only uses commas. But because of the length and complexity of your ballot title, which includes multiple instances of a series within a series, the use of semicolons would provide greater clarity and promote readability. Additionally, random capitalization appears throughout the text of your proposed amendment, which does not appear to serve any purpose. You may wish to correct this.

The post What Is "Human Intelligence," in Proposed Initiative Ballot Title, as Opposed to "Computer or Artificial Intelligence"? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Each year since 2018, the Center for Economic Accountability (CEA)—a nonpartisan think tank opposed to corporate welfare—has named its Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year, a dishonor awarded to the most egregious misuse of taxpayer funds nominally intended to spur economic growth.

This year, the ignoble honor goes to Michigan, which has awarded over $1.75 billion to Ford Motor Co. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL), a Chinese battery manufacturer. The two companies are jointly developing a factory in Marshall, Michigan, that would build lithium iron phosphate batteries for the automaker’s electric vehicle (E.V.) lineup.

In its announcement, the CEA breaks down what the state has pledged so far, which includes $630 million worth of road paving and site development; grants from various state funds of $210 million, $120 million, and $36 million; and a 15-year tax abatement valued at $772 million. Other estimates have put the total amount at $2.2 billion.

Last month, facing strong economic headwinds, Ford announced it was “re-timing and resizing some investments.” While the Michigan plant was originally intended to create 2,500 jobs, Ford changed its pledge to 1,700 jobs and lowered its potential output by 40 percent, estimated to shrink the company’s financial investment by $1 billion or more.

Since Ford originally pledged $3.5 billion, Michigan’s contribution to the project could be nearly as much as what Ford plans to spend on its own factory. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told reporters that Michigan’s investment may be “resized” as well, and “as Ford has had to make some changes…the state’s role will change as well.”

Of course, the deal’s merits were questionable from the start. When the project was first announced, Whitmer’s office claimed it would have “an employment multiplier of 4.38, which means that an additional 4.38 jobs in Michigan’s economy are anticipated to be created for every new direct job.”

This is a fanciful notion. Tim Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research has estimated that a more typical multiplier on a local or state level is between 1.5 and 2. Last month, Bartik calculated the estimated benefits of Michigan’s proposed investment; while he was broadly positive, he noted that a 4.38 multiplier was “very high,” and “if the Ford project had a more typical multiplier—2.5 rather than 4.38—the project’s gross benefits would be less than the incentive costs.”

The automaker’s announcement that it would back off on its Michigan development came just a month after the automaker announced it was delaying $12 billion in E.V. investment across the country due to financial losses. Ford, which previously estimated that it would lose as much as $4.5 billion this year on its E.V. division, revealed in October that it lost $36,000 on each E.V. it sold in the third quarter.

Notably, this marks the second year in a row that the CEA has given its highest dishonor to a plant making E.V.s or E.V. batteries: Last year’s “winner” was the state of Georgia, which inked a lucrative deal with upstart E.V. manufacturer Rivian worth as much as $1.5 billion in state subsidies at a time when the company had delivered fewer than 50 vehicles to customers.

In 2020, the CEA singled out Ohio’s award of over $60 million for General Motors to keep its plant in Lordstown open; the automaker closed the plant in 2019 but was only made to repay a portion of the incentives. It later sold the plant to Lordstown Motors, an E.V. manufacturer that benefited from $24.5 million in subsidies before declaring bankruptcy this year.

“It’s notable that in five years, we’ve now had two electric vehicle battery plants and one EV assembly plant stand out as the worst economic development deals of their respective years, even during an era of unprecedentedly large and dumb subsidies by state and local governments,” CEA President John Mozena noted in the press release. “Federal industrial policies promoting politically favored technologies are driving short-sighted decisions by state and local elected officials, and communities across the country will be paying the price for those deals long after the politics and policies have moved on.”

The post Ford E.V. Battery Plant in Michigan Named Worst Economic Development Deal of 2023 appeared first on Reason.com.

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Construction of an offshore wind farm that had the potential to power more than a half-million homes was canceled in late October, and a famously bad federal shipping regulation seems to be the prime culprit.

When Ørsted pulled the plug on the Ocean Wind project that was planned for the New Jersey coast, the Danish energy firm said in a statement that the decision was driven by “high inflation, rising interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks.”

While some of those things are obviously beyond the immediate control of American policy makers, subsequent reporting on Ørsted’s decision to abruptly cancel the project suggests that one factor stood out above the rest. The decision was “based in large part on big delays securing the ship it needed to build the project,” Reuters reported last month, citing company officials.

That Reuters report doesn’t include a specific mention of the Jones Act—the century-old law that effectively bans foreign-built ships from operating between American ports, and that subsequently drives up the cost of shipbuilding and shipping in the United States—but the subtext is pretty clear. In a call with reporters a few days after the project was canceled, Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper cited “significant delays on vessel availability” caused “a situation where we would need to go out and recontract all or very large scopes of the project at expectedly higher prices.”

That’s what the Jones Act does. As Reason has reported on many other occasions, the Jones Act is a nakedly protectionist law that severely limits competition in the American shipping market by requiring that ships operating between U.S. ports are American-built, American-crewed, and American-flagged.

Building offshore wind farms requires ships that can deliver supplies to the construction site and some specialty ships that serve as a base for building the turbines. While there are plenty of ships around the rest of the world that can do that work, companies like Ørsted can’t use those ships to build wind farms in American coastal waters.

“The Jones Act has essentially created a situation where so many vessels involved in the offshore wind installation process need to be built here, and right now there is only one. So that’s a huge constraint,” explained Chelsea Jean-Michel, an offshore wind analyst, in a recent episode of Bloomberg‘s Odd Lots podcast.

Yes, there’s just one: a wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV) currently under construction in Texas, which Dominion Energy plans to use to build a wind farm off the coast of Virginia. As Jean-Michel explained, Ørsted hoped to lease it for its own project near New Jersey. But construction of that one, lone American WTIV has been delayed and costs have ballooned.

Colin Grabow, a trade policy expert with the Cato Institute (and notable Jones Act critic) points out to Reason that the original price tag for the ship was about $500 million, but that has risen to over $650 million in recent estimates. Meanwhile, the ship was expected to be finished this year, but delivery is now expected late next year or in early 2025.

“It’s difficult to undertake such projects in an efficient manner when the Jones Act–compliant vessels needed for their construction are plagued by rising costs and—in the case of Ocean Wind 1 and 2—don’t even exist,” Grabow tells Reason.

Indeed, higher fixed costs on things like installation ships might have been manageable—even while being wasteful—with low interest rates. In the current environment, however, it makes sense that energy companies would rethink how they are allocating those investments. It seems like that’s exactly what Ørsted did. There are plenty of other countries around the world where it could invest in building offshore wind and not have those projects hobbled by the Jones Act.

What happened with the Ocean Wind project is yet another reminder that the federal government’s own rules are the biggest stumbling block to the Biden administration’s stated goal of having America produce 30 gigawatts of electricity from offshore wind by 2030.

Faced with the impediments created by the Jones Act, some companies are developing inefficient workarounds, like the Feederdock: a fixed installation vessel that can be served by Jones Act–compliant tug boats bringing supplies from the mainland. There have also been some small cracks in the Jones Act’s prohibition against using foreign-built ships for offshore wind projects. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection ruled that foreign-built ships could move crews and work materials to an offshore construction site without violating the Jones Act, which applies only to ships moving “passengers” and “merchandise.”

Markets tend to find a way, but the cost of the Jones Act’s protectionism is America getting less renewable energy from offshore wind farms that will cost more and take longer to build.

The post Federal Shipping Regulations Sank One of America's Biggest Offshore Wind Projects appeared first on Reason.com.

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Sweet sassy molassy! We started Reason‘s annual webathon fundraising week last Tuesday with a pretty robust target of $400,000 for supporting our journalism and commentary and jokes with tax-deductible donations as the 2023 calendar winds down. You smashed through that by Day 5. So we hiked the goal all the way up to an almost-unreasonable-sounding $600,000. How did you respond to this distant threshold?

With woodchippers.

As of the maxing out of our latest $80,000 match, the orange box to your right has now been overrun, and we have officially exceeded every past webathon in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms, except for 2021‘s ridonkulous $630,000 ($715,000 in 2023’s debased currency). Can we get there before the gong strikes midnight?

Well, beloved Reason Trustee Kerry Welsh (no relation) and lovely wife Helen Welsh have ponied up yet another matching grant, this time for $25,000, so anything’s possible. That is, if you….

CONTRIBUTE TO REASON’S HISTORY-MAKING WEBATHON RIGHT THE FARK NOW!

Let’s give you some final reasons for the Reason season. On Saturday, I linked to a bunch of Reason-staffer social media threads bragging about their work of the past 12 months. Add to those four more: from me, Eric Boehm, Fiona Harrigan, and Liz Wolfe.

Speaking of Wolfie, many of you in your donation comments singled out her stewardship of the recently revamped Reason Roundup. Two of several samples:

The new Reason Round Up has been great….I enjoyed doing my own research. I often do not have the time, the Reason Roundup gives me the opportunity to go in depth by clicking every article and link if I happen to be in that headspace; or read a well thought out synopsis from a libertarian perspective.

*

[T]he addition of Liz Wolfe has been transformative! Her wit and incisive commentary on the day’s news is truly “can’t miss” content. She’s got a knack for assembling interesting, varied content that lengthens my short attention span.

The good news—and yet another reason why you should donate right the hell today!—is that we have heard your feedback and are adding newsletters to the Roundup/Rattler/New at Reason.com/Reason Alert/NYC Events stable right and left. For instance, just today we have inaugurated a brand new weekly zoning/housing/regulation newsletter by Christian Britschgi titled Rent Free. In the near future we’ll debut another one by Robby Soave on “free speech, social media, and why everyone in the media is wrong everywhere all the time” (these quotes direct from Katherine Mangu-Ward on Slack). There will also be a new one from recently returned from maternity leave Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “devoted to sex, tech, and whatever the hell else ENB wants to write about” (again, KMW).

Go to our Newsletters page, click on the boxes that interest you (including a half-dozen info-rich newsletters coming from the Reason Foundation’s ace policy specialists), and then await news of how we are converting your donations into more (and more easily consumed) libertarian journalism. Yum!

PLEASE DONATE TO REASON LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW!

The post You Woodchipped Right Through <i>Reason</i>'s $600,000 Webathon Goal! appeared first on Reason.com.

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On this date in 1933, Americans ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, officially repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had ushered in Prohibition of alcohol just 14 years prior. Many of us will toast the occasion the same way Americans did in 1933: with a good drink. If you’re so inclined, you may also want to light up a smoke while you still can. Ninety years after the end of one era of Prohibition, we are gradually creeping into a new one forbidding the sale of tobacco and/or nicotine. And just as in that previous era, these laws are encouraging illicit markets, forcing consumers to buy more dangerous products, and leading to the arrest and prosecution of sellers.

Like the temperance movement of the previous century, the movement to eradicate tobacco and nicotine is global in scope. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is pushing to implement the world’s first nationwide “smoke-free generation” law, which would make it illegal for Brits currently aged 14 and under to ever purchase combustible tobacco for their entire lives. A similar law was passed and nearly enacted in New Zealand but will be reversed by the election of a new government.

Starting in 2024, Australia’s already strict laws against vaping will be tightened even further, banning the personal importation of all kinds of vape devices. Nicotine e-cigarettes will be legally available only by prescription and penalties for mere possession of illicit e-cigs or nicotine liquid range from fines of more than $20,000 to imprisonment. 

Despite recent assurances from federal health minister Mark Butler that law enforcement will focus on importers and sellers, one 49-year-old man caught by police in Western Australia with vaping liquid in his car has reportedly been charged with possessing a Schedule Four poison, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison. (Conventional cigarettes, which unlike vapes actually do kill millions of people every year, are not classified as poison under Australian law.)

In total, more than 40 countries have implemented bans on the sale of e-cigarettes, from oppressive states such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela to more liberal democracies such as Argentina, India, and Japan. Thailand threatens some of the harshest punishments, with threats of imprisonment and high-profile cases of police extorting foreign vapers for bribes.

By comparison, the United States remains a relatively free country when it comes to smoking and vaping, but prohibitionist policies are advancing. Five states and nearly 400 localities have passed some form of flavor ban. Massachusetts, the first state to comprehensively ban both flavored tobacco and flavored nicotine liquids, has seen a surging black market as a result; authorities are seizing so many illicit cigarettes and vapes that they are running out of room to store them.

As predicted by civil liberties advocates, flavor bans are also leading to arrests and prosecutions. Though bans do not typically impose criminal penalties directly, sellers participating in illicit markets can be charged with felony tax evasion. One pending case in Massachusetts may send two men to prison for up to five years on charges stemming from the sale of flavored cigarettes and e-cigs.

At the federal level, the Food and Drug Administration is preparing a national ban on menthol cigarettes. An even more ambitious proposal would mandate extremely low levels of nicotine in cigarettes, amounting to prohibition in all but name. The optimistic scenario envisioned by anti-smoking advocates is that these policies will effectively cut off the supply of forbidden products, nudging smokers to quit or switch to safer alternatives with little complication. The more realistic outcome is that the extremely lucrative business of supplying cigarettes to the nearly 30 million Americans who smoke will prove extremely attractive to criminal suppliers.

We have, of course, seen this all before with the prohibition of alcohol. Anti-smoking activists attempt to distance their policy proposals from the word “prohibition,” but the comparison is apt. The promise to target sellers rather than consumers is identical. The indifference to the lives of drinkers who were poisoned by tainted alcohol rather than allowed a safe and legal source of liquor is echoed in today’s policies that keep people smoking lethal cigarettes by banning safer alternatives. And while the United States has not yet created the conditions to completely turn the market for cigarettes over to illicit sellers, we can get a preview of what that may be like in the current rash of arson attacks on Australian tobacconists fueled by turf wars between competing gangs.

There is a deeper parallel in the ways that these prohibitions are publicly advocated. The temperance movement is caricatured in modern memory as a bunch of no-fun moralizing Protestants taking away Americans’ freedom to drink. Historian Mark Shrad’s excellent 2021 book Smashing the Liquor Machine is a reminder that the truth was far more nuanced; Prohibition was also a deeply progressive cause championed by reformers who sought to protect vulnerable populations from a predatory and destructive liquor traffic. The problems they identified were real, even if their solution proved to be fatally flawed.

Today’s advocates for nicotine and tobacco prohibitions are in the same vein of progressive reform; they portray their policies not as restrictions on personal freedom but rather as protections against the deadly and dishonest tobacco industry. This is evident in the responses to the reversal of New Zealand’s “world-leading” ban on tobacco, its change in policy described as “retrograde,” an “act of idiocy,” even as “systemic genocide” against the indigenous Maori. Suggestions that tobacco prohibition would infringe on liberties or have genuine downsides are barely given consideration among the press or public health experts.

Before shaking up the cocktails on this Repeal Day, today’s tobacco and nicotine prohibitionists may do well to take a few moments to contemplate what lessons they might take from their anti-alcohol predecessors. Both sets of reformers justifiably railed against the sale of dangerous substances; if anything, the case against tobacco is even stronger than that against booze. But there is an essential difference too: while all sources of alcohol are roughly equivalent from a health perspective, the harms of smoking can be greatly reduced by switching to innovative, lower-risk sources of nicotine.

That difference highlights an opportunity that was never available to the Anti-Saloon League: to defeat the enemy not by prohibition but by competition. Making safer products available and using less restrictive measures to nudge consumers to use them can save lives without risking the inherent dangers and unintended consequences of prohibition. While that outcome may be less satisfying to progressive reformers than bringing the hammer down on Big Tobacco, they might consider one more lesson from the Prohibition era. If a policy was so unworkable that people are still celebrating its repeal nearly a century later, it’s probably worth trying a different course of action today. 

The post Repeal Day Lessons for Tobacco Prohibitionists appeared first on Reason.com.

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