Orange County NC Website
include additional options that directly address the issue of disproportional representation. <br />He asked the Board to also please provide meaningful representation to the one-third of <br />Orange County citizens who are under represented by the current election system and <br />who will remain under represented under any of the official 3 options provided. <br />Jean Earnhardt lives in Chapel Hill Township on the outer fringes of Carrboro's <br />ETJ. She said that there must be some changes made and she leaves changes to the <br />experts. She thinks that the flip side of the majority of the population living in southern <br />Orange is that the majority of the property is in the northern Orange and that property is <br />very under represented. She said she wishes that the Board were here tonight not to <br />decide whether or not to change the system but to decide how best to change the system. <br />Will Raymond is a resident of Chapel Hill and he applauds the intent of tonight's <br />meeting. He would like to see the elections be opened up and made more <br />representational. He said that if the intent of Mr. Faison and the 1200 petitioners is to <br />improve Orange County's electoral representation, he suggests that instead of adopting <br />the current proposal as codified by 15258-3B that we start over and make some changes <br />based on a few key principles. He said that his first intent is to make the voting process <br />as convenient as reasonable. He believes super precincts would promote greater <br />involvement by the UNC student body but also in rural voters. He has worked with UNC <br />students and has assisted students in locating their polling places and has visited a <br />number of those polls on Election Day. Many of the students were confused and had <br />difficulty locating the polling places and of the polling places many of the locations were <br />greatly underutilized. To avoid this confusion, many students chose early voting at <br />Morehead Planetarium which basically stretched it way beyond its capacity, and calls to <br />the Board of Elections really did not resolve that issue. This trend was true in both <br />municipal and national elections. Greater freedom to choose the mast convenient polling <br />place should eliminate many of these problems. Also during the last general election <br />super precincts in the rural areas might have improved the turnout. As a poll sitter at <br />Caldwell, he said a number of voters were not sure where they should vote. One voter <br />with a small infant had to travel about 30 miles that day being bounced between three <br />different precincts but she did make her vote. The second intent is to make the vote as <br />representational as possible. There are a number of voting systems such as proportional, <br />cumulative, instant run off, and range based that do a better job of representing the will of <br />the people, especially the minority, than our current binary winner-take-all system. He <br />suggested that the Board be bold and pick a voting system that adequately represents the <br />will of the all our voting citizens. And finally he said he thinks that the intent should be to <br />have the widest possible candidate pool. He thinks that it is interesting that we are talking <br />about this on the day that the Libertarian Party was disbanded. He said he is not a <br />Libertarian but he thinks it is improper to disenfranchise citizens just because of their <br />political affiliation. So he calls on the Board to be brave and to create a system with the <br />widest possible pool of candidates whether they are Green, Libertarian, Republican, <br />Democrat, ar Independent we need to draw from the widest passible pool of qualified <br />candidates. National polls have showed a marked increase in the number of people who <br />have self-identified as Independents and now is the time to accommodate that trend. He <br />said he concurs with the intent but he suggests that the Board revisit it in light of these <br />three principles. <br />Vern Miller lives in Caldwell Community in the Little River Township. He said to <br />Commissioner Foushee that there was an opening in the county's Planning Board before <br />Commissioner Foushee was elected, and although he and another Caldwell Community <br />