There’s an old Gordon Lightfoot song called “Carefree Highway,” in which the singer declares, “Now the thing that I call livin’ is just bein’ satisfied / With knowin’ I got no one left to blame.” It’s an acknowledgement not just of personal responsibility but the liberation that comes with it.
We thought of that line following a House Election Law Committee hearing related to last month’s town election chaos. Tuesday’s debate focused on a “non-germane amendment” attached to “an innocuous bill about putting email addresses on absentee ballots,” as the Monitor’s David Brooks described it. The amendment, which was proposed by House Speaker Shawn Jasper, was anything but innocuous: It would have given towns the option of holding a special meeting next month to ratify the results of any election that was postponed due to the March 14 storm. The thinking was that if voters ratified the results of the postponed election, the town would be protected from future legal action. A town’s failure to ratify, however, would mean a new level of chaos because the results of the postponed election would be voided.
The committee was never able to break a 10-10 tie, and so the amendment met its end after a hearing that lasted more than five hours.
Jasper admitted that his proposal was not perfect, and we certainly had our concerns, but he also said there is no perfect solution to this mess. He’s probably right. But based on Tuesday’s hearing – a respectful discussion about how to solve a complex problem – we are confident lawmakers are more interested in finding the best possible solution than assigning blame. And because the best solution is often the simplest, we find ourselves in agreement with the New Hampshire Municipal Association, which suggests that lawmakers “simply state that for March 2017 only, moderators had authority under RSA 40:4 to postpone the voting day of the meeting due to the severe weather.”
Yes, there may still be a lawsuit or two, but for the majority of communities the storm would finally be over. We imagine that’s all most lawmakers want to happen, at least in the short term.
Democracy is at its best when blame takes a back seat to problem-solving, and we were heartened by the tone of debate on Tuesday. We hope that spirit persists in the days and months to come, on all issues great and small.
After all, what could be more New Hampshire than a bunch of neighbors standing around something broken and talking cordially about the best way to fix it?
And then fixing it.