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VAN DYKE: Okay. Well, yeah. Thank you. I do want to <br /> mention that . Let me start with the Con-Con ballot in ' 78, <br /> which was statewide, then talk about the Honolulu Charter <br /> Review Commission. <br /> The ballot in both of those situations . . . the structure of <br /> the ballot became . . . took up an enormous amount of the group ' s <br /> time and became very controversial . In ' 78, they proposed <br /> about 178 different amendments to the State Constitution and <br /> grouped them in about 35 categories . So there were 35 separate <br /> decisions to be made. <br /> The delegates of the Con-Con obviously wanted them all to <br /> be adopted, and so they offered the voters this set of <br /> alternatives . You could vote yes on everything. That was an <br /> easy vote to say. Or you could vote no on specific things that <br /> you didn ' t like. And if you voted no on some, all the others <br /> were deemed to be yes . <br /> And so what happened is that there were a number of <br /> controversial ones , and so a lot of people voted no on a lot of <br /> them. But the nos did not get 50% on any one of them, and so <br /> all were adopted. And this of course pleased the delegates and, <br /> in my judgment, there were a lot of good provisions , so I <br /> thought it was a good tactic; but it was thought by many people <br /> as being unfair because it was obviously stacked in favor of a <br /> yes vote, because the people who did not vote on certain things <br /> because they didn' t care and understand it , they were deemed to <br /> have voted yes on all those provisions . <br /> So that might be something you' d wanna avoid because it <br /> seems a little shady to stack it in that fashion. <br /> Now in the Honolulu situation, what they did and, again <br /> they had some very controversial ones, they were getting rid of <br /> the district . . . the neighborhood boards and they were increasing <br /> salaries and changing the size of districts and adding positions <br /> and so on, to the staff. So basically they offered the voters <br /> an all-or-nothing package . You gotta take all our amendments <br /> or none of them. And in that situation, everybody had one or <br /> two of them they didn' t like, and so virtually everybody voted <br /> no . It was . . . the vote was 160,000 no and 50,000 yes , which is <br /> an unheard of landslide against the . . . this kind of a package . <br /> So that again I think would be something to avoid, that you <br /> wouldn' t want to list all your amendments separately. <br /> And then, in terms of how you write them, you have to of <br /> course have one version in which you layout specifically the <br /> exact language changes that you' re making. But then you would <br /> have a summary as well and you' d have an educational program in <br /> which you' d try to make available to people the different <br /> arguments in favor of the proposals . And in terms of language, <br /> I think just a kind of common sense summary of what exactly <br /> you' re trying to accomplish. And in the Honolulu situation for <br /> instance, they would publish full-page ads in which they listed <br /> everything and they had, you know, what the change was and what <br /> 119 <br />