Ethics Newsline®

Why Democracy and Anonymity Don’t Mix

Jun 16th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

By the time we got there last Saturday, the annual town meeting in Lincolnville, Maine, was under way. Doris Weed shooed us in with a whispered greeting, handing us our bright teal “Registered Voter” cards without asking for identification. She’s worked in the town office for decades and knows just about all of our 2,000 citizens by name.

The folding plastic chairs in the elementary school gym were pretty well filled, so we took seats down front. Up front were the selectmen — they’re still called that, even though two of them are women, including the chair. Joining them were the town officials At the rostrum was Lois Lyman, a librarian and editorial consultant who had agreed somewhat reluctantly to step in at the last minute. As we sat down, she was shepherding Article 10 (of 34) toward a vote. At issue: Does the town wish to appropriate $314,417 for the municipal administration budget, or reduce that number through an amendment by trimming Karen Secotte’s receptionist position back to part-time?

That, of course, was not the real question. The meeting, clearly, was still in throat-clearing mode, with the Big Issue still to come. Lois ran it with a deft hand, and under her self-deprecating grace the tenor was as thoughtful and intelligent as it was civil and polite. Which was a good thing because by Article 12 the sparks were going to start flying. That’s when we would decide whether to eliminate the entire police department budget of $110,564, effectively closing the department.

It’s been said that a New England town meeting is democracy in its purest form. Everyone can speak up, everyone can vote, and every detail of the budget is available for inspection — whether it was $300 for Memorial Day flags or $80,000 to fix that dangerous intersection where Thurlow Road meets Youngtown Road as you come over the blind rise past the winery. But the past five years have been tough. Tax collections have risen 65 percent, and the trend appears to be continuing. Now, with gas prices slamming rural communities where people drive trucks to work at jobs miles from home, every penny matters. The budget committee had labored for months, agonizing over what and how to cut. The selectmen had approved their numbers and handed them over to the voters. At issue was a dilemma fundamentally moral in its structure: Will we honor the needs of the community, represented in the collective budget, or respect the needs of the individual, represented by the struggling taxpayer?

This year it came down to the police. At times we’ve had a local constable, and at other times we’ve been serviced by the Waldo County sheriff’s officers. Now, with our own full-time police chief and four part-time officers, some people were happy to feel a greater sense of comfort. They worried that drug dealers already had targeted Maine’s 3,478 miles of coastline — longer than California’s, as it weaves around estuaries and peninsulas with more nooks and crannies than an English muffin — as a place to land boatloads of drugs unnoticed. They worried that U.S. Route 1, running through Lincolnville on its way from Canada to Florida, easily brought outsiders into the community. But others saw the police department as wasteful, outsized for a town this small, and providing a service we could have more cheaply even if it meant waiting longer for a sheriff’s officer to arrive when called. They warned of a false sense of security from thinking that one patrol car could effectively cover a township of 44 square miles in any case. And they worried in general that the town office was becoming too large and, well, too officious.

It had all come to head four days earlier at the June election. There, along with primary decisions about candidates for the U. S. Congress and the Senate in November, was Article 3, a referendum to “cease any operation” of the local police. It was followed by Article 4, which would amend the town charter to allow Article 3 to be implemented. While Article 3 was a classic no-means-yes question, requiring either a no vote to keep the police or a yes to disband them, Article 4 was a complex piece of legalese. Voters on Tuesday apparently had been baffled. By eight votes — 401 to 393 — they had eliminated the police, but by 17 votes they had refused to change the charter — meaning, in effect, that the police couldn’t be eliminated.

Unless, of course, the town meeting refused to appropriate money. So on Saturday the forces on both sides had mustered their best arguments, with the eliminators proposing an amendment removing $110,564 from the budget. It took her a good half hour, but when Lois finally had run through the speakers on both sides and we held up our teal cards for a vote, the amendment was roundly defeated.

So Lincolnville still has its police force. But watching the process, I could see that the town has something even more important: its sense of civility, of comity, of friendliness. At the national level, democracy is being fractured and abraded by the polarizing forces of animosity, cynicism, and rant. The national media may have a role in this polarization, sparking arguments that can then be sensationalized. But Lincolnville has no national media exposure. We all live here. When we’re not at a town meeting, we see each other at the post office or on the pier or down at Breezemere Park where the town band has its concerts. We can argue, but we can’t hide.

Maybe that’s the overlooked secret of effective democracy — that while ballots can be secret, the debate must be public. In the end, democracy and anonymity don’t mix. On a national scale, and especially on blogs and talk radio, you can hide. You can rail and recriminate without giving your name. You can’t do that in a New England town meeting. Yes, feelings can be strong, but the forces tending to keep discourse civil are even stronger.

That’s why Lois needed to set an inclusive tone. That’s why speaker after speaker acknowledged sympathy and understanding for the other side. What they were debating was not right versus wrong: Both sides had their share of right. Of such tough ethical issues are democracies made.