Constitutional Convention, Question #1 Defeated
GoLocalProv News Team
Constitutional Convention, Question #1 Defeated
With 431 of 453 polling places reporting (95%), the vote to reject is 63%. Mail ballots have not been counted.
The matter is required to come before the voters every ten years.
A constitutional convention is a gathering where delegates propose amendments and changes to the state constitution.
Labor unions and the ACLU led an effort to kill the proposal. Unions spent tens of thousands of dollars to kill the initiative.
A number of "good government" reformers urged voters to vote yes.
Reformer Ken Block had written in an opinion piece published in GoLocal, “If you, like me, live in Rhode Island, you live in a beautiful but politically dysfunctional state. Our government has failed to keep a critical bridge from decaying to the point of failure, worked hard to avoid assigning blame for the failure, and proved itself inept at procuring a replacement bridge.”
“You have watched our state budget balloon from a bloated $10 billion to a monumental $14 billion—our state budget now clocks in at around $14,000 per person. Our state budget process can charitably be called opaque. The governor proposes a budget, and then the General Assembly does whatever they want to it. The public and legislature get a week or two to digest it before the vote comes to approve the budget. There is no altering the legislature's budget and no checks and balances on the process,” wrote Block.