1. Minister Gideon Saar called for legislation to turn the day of municipal elections into a national holiday, just as it is for national elections.
Saar saw the low voter turnout in the recent municipal elections. Bet Shemesh had a decent turnout, with turnout in the range of 65%, but many municipalities had turnout as low as 20%!!! Nation-wide the average turnout in the municipal elections 3 weeks ago stood at 51%. The assumption is that this is affected largely by the fact that people have to go to work as usual, so cannot vote during the day. Then they get home at night and find the lines at the voting booth to be too long to bother, or they are just too tired and frustrated when they get home and decide to not bother going to vote.Turning municipal elections day into a national holiday, would most likely involve more people in the democratic process of voting.
I am in favor. And, I think municipal elections and national elections should be scheduled so that the effect of the voting vacation days will be maximized.
2. Minister Yisrael Katz wants to change the system of obtaining a drivers license.The drivers license testers have gone on strike today in an attempt to rework their group agreement.
Katz, not giving in so quickly, announced that he has had enough of the testers and their behavior. Instead of providing good service they are going on protests and strikes and harming the young people who have been waiting for drivers license exams. Katz says the solution to the issue is to privatize, and he has instructed the director of the Ministry of Transportation to prepare a plan by which the exams will be privatized. Anybody who wants to take the exam will be able to go on any day and take it. Competition - no lines and long waits, no bureaucracy.I don't know how it works in other places, but I do not remember from when I got my drivers license in Chicago that the system was private and I had a choice of testing places. I seem to remember that it was controlled by the State, the City of Chicago, through the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Is the examination for drivers licenses run privately in any country? How does that work? I am not sure this is something the State should really be giving up control of.
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It is private in Ontsrio , Canada. If in not mistaken, the DMV equivalent is a private company.
ReplyDeleteThere have been studies about the impact of giving a day off for election day. The results are that it does not significantly increase voter turnout. Here's one example.
ReplyDeleteI agree that giving people a day off will not boost numbers. People are generally less interested in local politics which they find does not really matter who is ruling. Having national parties take part in local elections does not mean much and perhaps even distances people further. A better idea would be to have absentee polling stations on previous dates. Without opening up all voting stations, just open a few central ones, where people can come ahead of time. Another idea would be to have stations open two days in a row, but that might be too expensive and require thousands of security guards to watch overnight.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the problem isn't so much whether to privatize the DMV or not, but the fact that labor unions here have too much power that they can shut down industries almost at will. Getting rid of them is not an easy task so I suppose privatizing does the same thing in way, if it's not gov't run, it's not under the labor union.
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