THE VALID VERDICT An Interview with Larry Benskyby Frank Ferris
On February 28th, 1999, Larry Bensky spoke at the Pacifica National Board meeting held in Berkeley. Mary Frances Berry refused to hear his full remarks on that occasion, cutting his speech short at a two-minute limit. Part of Bensky's prepared remarks for that occasion concerned Pacifica elections at the local and national level. He'd planned to speak of the danger of factional abuse of an open election process, the potential hypocrisy of replicating the "manipulated elections" Pacifica had so often condemned elsewhere, and the "problem of concentrating too much of the limited time and energy inside stations to the structures of the stations themselves, rather than the programs which the stations are there to broadcast." He warned of the hazard of "allowing the air to be used for damaging, factionalized, error-filled polemics by candidates."
This reporter spoke with Bensky on May 5th.
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F: Talk about how you feel about elections today, given the preparations that have been made for the LAB elections, and the possible prospect of having a new National Board.
L: Well, my concerns remain the same. You know, as I said back on Feb 28, elections don't guarantee democracy, but you can't have democracy without elections. The question is, how you structure an election, who participates in it, how it's weighted--My concerns would be the same as I have stated throughout -- One: I think you need to have a process by which people are encouraged to come forth, who have the positive energy to devote to the job, and once you have that process in place, you need to have a process in place where the electorate is engaged with accurate and useful information. Then you have to have a process in place that facilitates their casting of their ballots. Then I think you have to have a rule in place that if the first three criteria haven't been met, the election is annulled.
One of the ways you do that is by making sure that a certain minimal percentage of your potential (?) electorate cast ballots. If you fall below that percentage, it indicates to me that you haven't engaged your people sufficiently and it's not a valid verdict. So there are all of those challenges to overcome. But having said that, I think that whatever process good and dedicated people come up with who have been working on this would be a whole lot better than we have right now.
F: So what do you regard as being an adequate level of participation to make a valid election?
L: Well I think of places around the world that have experimented with this-- like for example in Italy, where a national referendum has to have the participation of fifty percent of the electorate, or its verdict, no matter what it is, is null. In other words, if only forty percent of the people vote -- ninety percent one way and ten percent the other way -- it doesn't matter. It only means the people haven't voted. I understand the same is true in the recent Russian elections. The fifty percent threshold in both those elections, if half the electorate hasn't voted, it isn't considered a valid election. And, in fact, you get seventy-eighty-ninety percent participation in those elections. But I know that there have been several cases of insufficient turnout and the results have been thrown out. Now, I don't think it should go much below fifty percent. You could argue forty percent, but it would have to be pretty high.
F: Fifty percent of all the subscribers?
L: If that's who's eligible.
F: So do you feel that the process should be carried out on the air a lot?
L: I don't know about "a lot." Certainly, "enough." In other words, I think there should be candidates' forums, where candidates are either encouraged to make their own statements, or appear in a joint appearance, whereby they are able to speak to each other and take questions from the audience... Now one way of doing this would be by doing a one-hour weekly forum at a regular time period. But I haven't thought about what the format should be. I believe it should be extensive, but not overwhelming.
F: Have you been familiar with the work that's been done in the past year about proportional representation, choice elections...?
L: Yeah, I have, and I'm not sure I understand it. I'll understand it better this Sunday 'cause I'll be doing a program on it. Again, I think there's a lot of people who want to set up what they feel to be a fair election process and they over-intellectualize, and make it so complicated that most people don't understand what they're doing. So my fear is that if it gets so complicated that people don't understand what they're doing, they'll do what they do in other elections -- don't bother to vote. And, you know, there are a lot of people who have a lot of interesting political science and statistical backgrounds, who work hard to design a fair election, but a lot of their exposure to the electorate when you get out there is that people don't understand it. And that's not a knock on people who don't understand it, or on the people who are designing it, but I think it needs to be transparent and simple.
F: What about the National Board? If you wanted to wax creative about your image of a democratized Pacifica, what would you like to see happen if the current Board were tossed out and we got some kind of an ideal Board, what do you see happening at KPFA?
L: I think the entire Board itself should be elected nationally. Let me revise that: I think a large percentage should be elected but I think they should also put some safeguards in there; so if, for example, the entire Board, as elected, turns out to be men, that there be reserved maybe twenty percent or thirty percent or some percentage to be selected by those elected with the understanding that they would then select women. Or this could be applied to ethnic groups, or other constituencies. However, I think there should be strict guidelines for proportional representation from signal areas. In other words, I think that should be divided up equally, although there are different listener numbers. I think it's fair to say that we rise and sink together, and we should all have equal representation. And I would hope that turnout would be large. I would then see that board empowering whatever national staff is necessary to exist. As far as I'm concerned, it should be a much smaller staff, and national staff should work FOR the station, not tell the station what it can and cannot do.
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