no on 105!

One of the reasons why I find prop 105 wanting is that it is attempting to abandon the traditional democratic mechanism that have served us so well for so many years. The bill says that to “A "yes" vote shall have the effect of requiring that a majority of registered voters approve any initiative measure establishing, imposing or raising a tax, fee, or other revenue, or mandating a spending obligation, whether on a private person, labor organization, other private legal entity, or the state, in order to become law.” This is not how it works. If you don’t vote you are not counted as a no. that is exactly what this prop is trying to do.
If this bill was in place today a number of props that passed by larger margins would not be law. The average turn out for election in America is very low. For example only about 50% of Americans vote in presidential elections. This number gets smaller and smaller the more removed for that national context one gets. If prop 105 passes there is little chance that any prop with a money increase will pass.
Additionally, I believe that because we have an expressed right as American citizens to vote, this implies a right to abstain from voting. There have been times in the past were I have exercised this implied right. If Prop 105 were to pass this right to not vote would be infringed upon because my vote would count as a “no” vote. When I chose to abstain I am choosing to do just that. I am not choosing to abstain to vote no. If I wanted to vote no I would have gone to my polling location and voted no. at the end of the day this prop is infringing on my voting rights.
This can only lead to people staying home and not participating in the political process at all. This is so dangerous to our civic virtue. At a time in which our poltics are so polarized we need to be creating incentives for the middle to vote not creating obstacles. In his 1830 work entitled democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville talks the dangers of this. He calls it a soft despotism. In Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes the following about soft despotism:
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
This soft despotism leads to a tyranny of the majority. A tyranny of the majority is when the majority creates political situation in which it takes advantage of the political minority or minorities.
This is exactly what would happen if prop 105 passes. Those who do not want to increase government spending of any kind become unlikely bed fellows with registered voters who choose to not vote to prevent the most noble employment of the direct Initiative system; the betterment of the common good of Arizonans.