In Arizona we elect three representatives per district.

You can’t convince me that a unicameral legislature would be worse (after all it does, as he points out, work fine in Nebraska).

What that would do would be allow us to have a legislature only one-third (or two-thirds if you mandate two per district) the size it is now, or possibly create smaller (i.e. more local) districts, or some combination thereof.

The only reason the founding fathers of the United States created a two-chamber Congress was because they needed to compromise between large states that wanted representation based on population and small states that wanted it based on equal representation between states.

Because of this nearly every state has a house and a Senate but unlike the U.S. Congress in every state representation in both bodies is based on population (in fact the Supreme Court once ruled in a Georgia case, in which Georgia had been electing legislators per county that it has to be done that way), so the two bodies essentially duplicate each other in purpose.

A unicameral (and possibly even nonpartisan) legislature like Nebraska’s would remove this redundancy.

I’ve not stopped to figure out how much it would save us to have a smaller, one-chamber legislature but I bet it’s not an insignificant amount.

Thanks, Bill. This may be a good idea for some future ballot initiative, if enough groups want to get behind it and get the signatures.

Nonsense, Jack. For over 3 decades national conservative groups have engaged in a well-funded and highly organized effort to stack local offices with a “farm team” of movement conservatives. They impose a litmus test on their key issues (abortion, teaching evolution, etc.) on all candidates, even for the lowest level and most mundane offices.

A candidate is only as good as the organization and the volunteers behind a candidate. This is the reason why independents do not get elected to office. That isn’t going to change with nonpartisan elections. Voters know which candidate is aligned with which party and is backed by its organization. I know this from experience working elections in Maricopa County.

They probably didn’t testify because it doesn’t effect them at all (at least not this election cycle). It’s odd because I read similar comments over at that other blog. Apparently you don’t understand that this bill has nothing to do with the current candidates at all–at least not the candidates for council. It goes into effect AFTER this election and will effect the mayoral/council races for 2011. It does effect Nina and Karen because they are busy running for mayor now while they are pretending to run for council. Republicans never had a chance of winning these races anyway. The point is not to get Republicans elected. The point is to get good candidates to run in the first place that would never run because of the crazy primary. It’s pretty diabolical, actually, because while Nina and Karen are both fighting each other over who is the most left, they will be judged when they run for mayor by a much larger group of people in September of 2011 that includes Republicans and Independents. You might want to tell your buddy, AZ Blue Meanie, this, because apparently he has the same talking points you do.

The only chance the Republicans have of picking up any council seats this year is with a citywide election. If it is ward only, the election will be held in only Wards 3, 5 and 6 — heavily Democratic voter registration wards where the Democratic incumbents will be expected to win in a walk.

Paton’s bill demonstrates the law of unintended consequences. His bill assures that Republicans have no chance of winning any council seats this year.

This realization may explain why no city council members testified against this bill.