I’ve been a reform-minded guy for a long time, in addition to being a realtor. Over the years, I’ve written about necessary political reforms that impact you as a home owner. These following four reforms are pretty crucial to healing our democracy.

As we start 2021 (hopefully fresh), we need to take a deeper look at reforms.

You can’t have good outcomes if your voting system is a mess. Our is.

The system intentionally discourages participation (at least in Arizona), even as individuals work to bring out more voters. The system creates a feeling among voters that their votes don’t count. I excludes many people.

Setting aside lies about voter fraud in America and the many laws in place that are nothing other than voter suppression, I put together these four reforms that politicians will never get behind, but which could dramatically improve our democracy if regular people like you step up and make it happen.

I’ll summarize here, with links so you can dig in a little, if you are so inclined. These four reforms address specific and inter-related issues around corruption, fair representation, finding common ground.

1. Lobbying Reform

We don’t like lobbyists. They seem so sketchy. However, lobbying is protected in the first amendment as your right to “petition the government for the redress of grievances.” So, we can’t outlaw lobbying.

What you call a “bad lobbyist” may be my “protector of freedoms.”

However, nothing in the Constitution says we can’t restrict how much money lobbyists or the companies that employ them can give to elected officials as campaign contributions. In fact, I discovered when I was in office that there is clear legal precedence from Wall Street for dramatically restricting how much money lobbyists can contribute to politicians.

In other words, lobby all you want, but you need to win on the argument, not on the weight of stack of dollars you hand over.

In the 1940’s the investment industry restricted how much individuals can give to politicians because they did not want undue influence to corrupt the market, particularly the municipal bond market.

Why can’t this same reasoning about conflict of interest be applied to the lobbying industry?

Have a look at my piece laying out that argument here.

2. Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked Choice Voting, or “RCV” is all the rage. Conservative-leaning Alaska just passed an initiative to vote using this system and the more moderate-leaning Maine did in 2018.

It is an intuitive system, especially once you try it.

In short, it allows you to vote for the candidates in the order you’d like to see them win.

In our state, with a very independent and “maverick” tradition, RCV is perfect and would result in candidates who have to appeal beyond their extreme base, either right or left.

In other words, the political parties will fight it.

This reform would result in a legislature that is more likely to find common ground and laws that work for more people.

Have a look at this article, which describes how it works and introduces you to a group in Arizona that is organizing toward the reform.

3. Independent Redistricting

Redistricting informs everything, but the public knows the least about the process. Further, in many states the elected officials draw their own lines.

And, while Arizona created an independent redistricting commission in 2000, both parties have over the years discovered ways to manipulate the process.

We are in a position now that I predicted years ago –the governor has rigged the system of appointing the next commission to favor his party.

I don’t care which party it is, that is wrong.

Our commission is made up of 5 members, 2 Dems, 2 Republicans and 1 independent. That creates a terrible situation in which both parties try to put a phony independent in that seat.

I hate to be the guy who said, “I told you so”, but we could have fixed this years ago.

We need to have a commission made up of 9 members: 3 Dems, 3 Republicans and 3 Independents. We need to remove the power that the governor has over vetting commissioners and we need to allow the commission to make a greater number of competitive districts so that we all have actual choices in our elections.

See this piece on some efforts in early 2020 that would have undermined the Voting Rights Act in Arizona redistricting

4. Dark Money

People have been mis-using the term “dark money” to mean “money that my political enemies use to influence the election.”

Dark money is actually something very specific. It is money that corporations (read “companies, unions, charities, uber-wealthy or political non-profits”) can use to influence the election without disclosing who is behind it.

In other words, they can spend incredible amounts of money to lie or mislead people and we don’t know who’s doing the lying.

And the reality is that both parties have become addicted to dark money.

Why is this a problem? Proponents say it’s our 1st amendment right to spend as much money as we want on elections, right?

That is true. Kinda.

The amounts are unlimited and can come from corporations (per a Supreme Court ruling called Citizen’s United v. FEC), but disclosure can still happen –even though few states or the federal government require it.

Even the very conservative Justice Scalia, while ruling that the amount of money corporations spend should be unlimited, was very clear that we have the right to force disclosure of who is behind those expenditures.

He said, “(r)equiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . . . hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.“

In Arizona, former Attorney General Terry Goddard has pointed the way to how we can create this disclosure, via a couple ballot measure attempts. He has just missed the mark, in part because of GOP roadblocks to the citizen initiative process and in part because Democratic-leaning groups are equally addicted to dark money and resisted his efforts.

You can read about that a little here, but unfortunately the Outlaw Dirty Money website is down as they decide whether to try to run another initiative in 2022.

Without reforms like these four, we are going to find ourselves continuing the our path toward less democracy and more corruption.

Meet “ranked choice voting”, a form of voting that is difficult to explain but refreshingly intuitive, once you try it.

Actually. Lemme rephrase that. It’s not difficult to explain. But, it takes more time to explain than the 30 seconds allotted in our Twitter feed quick consumption media landscape.

But not much longer.

Furthermore, it holds a key to how our American democratic experiment might survive.

Ask people who have used the system and they immediately get it. It is an experience thing.

Here. I’ll explain it.

Ready?

You rank the candidates in the order you want to see them win.

Tadaaaaah!

I really like how this video explains the concept and how the votes are counted.

There are huge benefits to that. In our current “winner take all” system, you may have a majority of people who are unhappy with the winner because the vote was so divided that the winner had less than 50% of the vote, or a plurality.

Or, as we all know, we get divided in to political camps that are dominated by the extremes in each camp. You know, the thing that our founding fathers did not want to happen.

Did I mention that ranked choice voting, or “RCV” eliminates the primary election? That is why it is also referred to as an “instant run-off election.”

Imagine the cost savings and seeing fewer campaign signs since there would no longer be a primary and a general election.

Further, RCV creates a system where candidates have to do reach out beyond their base voters, since they are running against everybody else.

This is not an academic discussion for me. I was honored to work on an RCV election in Australia in 2006. I saw how simple it was. But, more importantly, the people there were less wedded to their parties, to their tribes. There were more parties, as a result –and more ideas.

If their #1 choice did not get in, then their #2 might have, so they were less likely to be dissatisfied and they felt that the system offered them more.

Less tribalism, more finding common ground, saving money on elections. Who doesn’t wan’t that? RCV just passed in Alaska and it has been in effect in Maine for one election.

Alaska, BTW, is a very conservative state and Maine is more liberal. In Australia, the conservatives win just as often as the liberals.

So, in case you are thinking that RCV favors one party over another, it does not.

There is an effort in Arizona to bring this to our state. It is a hard uphill battle, since neither political party wants it. They know that it will dilute their power.

But, I’m an American first and my party comes second. I hope you feel the same way.

Donna Reiner, a local historian and a good friend of Get Your PHX, has written many articles over the years for the Arizona Republic and others about Phoenix history and memorials. This month, she tells us about the few times that it snowed in Phoenix, as the city first began to grow.

We use her services when we list properties of historic significance to help us tell the stories behind the homes.

We are happy that Donna is allowing us to re-publish some of her articles on a monthly basis. If you or your business ever needs a historian, let Donna know at laydeescholar “at” hotmail.com.

Let it snow, let it snow. Yes, it’s winter and in true Phoenix fashion, we wait for the snow…..to fall and pile up in the mountains. Many of us like to play in it and others want it to snow for its benefits to the watershed.

After recently spending ten days in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the geographic center of North America, I became acquainted with huge mounds of snow, grey days, and very, very cold temperatures. For this Phoenician, snow is best in the mountains so one can ski or sled. Fortunately, it infrequently happens here.

Picture this at noon, November 19, 1919. You are downtown and walk outside. You see strange flakes falling from the sky and they are not soot. Our local weatherman attested that snow fell in Phoenix that day and time. Yes, in November at noon and a whole .1 inch! Ok, it was not normal. In fact, that was the earliest it had snowed in Phoenix since the US Weather Station had been established here. (It had snowed .2 inches in March 1917, but it melted far too quickly to be any fun.)

It snowed or flurried, enough to count, again the following year, but nothing significant until January 1933. Drumroll….it actually snowed for nearly two hours on the evening of January 20th and the weather bureau reported 1 inch. Too bad the temperature rose and the precipitation turned to rain and destroyed the snow.

Four years later almost to the day, it snowed again in Phoenix. But this time during the day and that 1 inch of white fluffy stuff stuck for several hours so children and adults had fun making snowmen and having snowball fights. Great fun for all the desert dwellers who were not used to such weather. If you lived further out from town, you might have experienced up to four inches.

And looking back over the past 82 years, those two instances, 1933 and 1937, have been Phoenix’s heaviest recorded snowfall. A half-inch or less or flurries, while recorded by the weather bureau, are not much to brag about to friends and relatives.

If it snows now at the end of January (not necessarily within our city limits or where it can be officially recorded), there is a clear reason as explained by my son. “Mom, it’s the Waste Management (Phoenix) Open.”

The December Market Update shows the supply problem getting worse. There are only 7,388 listings available in this market, versus 13,869 last year – down 46.7% – and down 14.9% from 8,682 last month.

People continue to ask whether this December market condition is due to Covid. Perhaps. But, I think there are a lot of reasons. I’ve felt for a long time that this problem dates back to the Great Recession. Individuals and corporations starting in about 2009 were buying properties, sometimes 100 at a time, to turn in to rentals. Then, over the past 10 years, people and corporations bought more homes to turn in to short term rentals.

In addition, as prices went up, people who might have wanted to sell and then buy a new home felt they could not afford the move.

In all, these have created a perfect storm in which homes that typically cycle on and off market about every 7-10 years are not.

Here’s what our friends at the Cromford Report have to say about the December market.

“The supply situation has gone from bad to worse with many areas hitting record lows for the number of homes available to buy. This is not because of a low number of new listings. The flow of new listings was respectable in November and exceeded the total for November 2019 and 2018. However, it increased by far less than the annual increase in demand and many of these new listings went under contract within days of listing. We exited November with 15% fewer homes for sale than we entered it. We have run out of adjectives to describe the weakness of the supply situation. It looks almost certain that supply will collapse further during December, so if we had a good adjective we would need a better one for January 3. Demand is extraordinarily strong for this late in the season, so we currently have a market that is more unbalanced (in favor of sellers) than we have ever seen before, even at the height of the 2005 bubble. But next month will be be even more extreme.

There seems to be a certain amount of denial in some quarters. Concerns about delinquency rates and forbearance are being widely discussed. The idea is often expressed that this can reverse the current situation, as if this is a foregone conclusion. We do not think the level of delinquency is anything like high enough to seriously disrupt the housing market. For such drama you probably need to look to the commercial real estate market, particularly the retail, office and hotel sectors. Housing has been bolstered by the pandemic. This is a worldwide phenomenon, not confined to Arizona or even the USA. At times of medical emergency, people really value their homes across the globe.

We would agree that a market cannot keep getting hotter forever, but according to Black Knight Financial Services, the level of delinquency has fallen for the last 5 months. Pre-payment activity is the highest since 2004. It is likely that we will see more distressed sales in 2021 than 2020, but 2020 was a record all-time low and reverting to normal would help a bit with the supply situation. In fact we would have to see a colossal increase in delinquency from current levels just to get back to normal supply conditions.”

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