That's Bill Bradbury for ya. Did you also see how he cleverly ordered the POTUS? He sure doesn't try to hide his obvious bias.

Candidates are always ordered on the ballot using a randomly selected alphabet. The random alphabet is selected each year.

Jimmy_z--are you joking? The ordering of candidates' names is done randomly under ORS 254.155.

Yeah, random, sure. Who could have picked it better? Just like how Bill changed the rules to disallow Nader. Like my write-in is even going to matter now. That is one of the many reasons I voted for Close.

Dice are also random, but I can roll a 7 if I throw them enough times.

Yeah, our predominantly Republican legislature surely has a motivation for leaving that all up to Bill's--or any other D's--discretion (b/c let's face it, our statewide offices tend to be Ds). Riiiiight. Give me a break.

Jimmy_Z,

And do you believe there are still WMD in Iraq, too?

If I wanted to believe in conspiracy theories, I would definitely believe that the wording of this measure is more than coincidence, doubly so since as pointed out it is semanantically in reverse from a similar measure to change (repeal) county law.

Triply so considering rather serious recall efforts. I easily imagine Voter X going, "County Term Limits ..... yeah!"

This could use an investigative follow-up report.

Someone could have gone to court and challenged the term limits measure's "title" (defined to include caption, actual title, description, and summary, not solely what we think of as a "title").
That's exactly what happened with the Multnomah County Tax repeal. It was challenged, a hearing was held, a judge ruled, and the sponsor modified the "title" accordingly (apparently the changes were relatively minor).

It's worse than you think. The Multnomah Co. Charter Review committee tried to repeal county term limits in 1990 and 1998. It lost both times.

In the 1998 repeal attempt the ballot title said "Repeals County Term Limits". Even with no organized opposition, it went down 64-36. I guess they decided the honest approach wouldn't work this time.

They don't gather any signatures, they just bide their time and try to fool the voters during a big election.

The sad this is that Multnomah County Commissioners are poster children for county term limits.

Pankleb,

Are you really suggesting that the rest of us are to blame for not figuring out how to challenge the county's deceptive ballot title?

I know we should be suspicious of anything coming from the County these days, but eternal vigilance to every political maneuver is a tall task.

This is a lot like blaming the mugging victim for not paying attention to where he was jogging.

It's fairly obvious that the County is try to pull one over on us.

How can you continue to make excuses for them?

Eric,

I was just suggesting that there's a process, in case someone thought there was no potential way to change it. That said, the media did a pretty good job of covering the Mult. County tax repeal over the past few months. However, I knew nothing about the Multnomah Charter measures until a couple of weeks ago. (This is probably the fault of our elected officials for failing to publicize the measures.) By the time people became aware of their existence, it was far too late to challenge the Charter ballot measure titles.