Eliminating the requirement that an informational election brochure be mailed to every borough boxholder and eliminating the requirement of the borough clerk to seek authorship advocating approval and rejection of ballot propositions was addressed in the approval of KPB Ordinance 2022-44 at the Borough Assembly meeting held on Wednesday.
The supporters of the ordinance claimed that voter education is critical for wise decisions, and technology is a good alternative. Those opposed of the ordinance claimed that we should not be limiting access to information, and postcards are just as likely to end up in the landfill as a pamphlet.
Borough Vice President Tyson Cox explained the first part of ordinance;
“There are two major things that are happening here. The first one is, is it’s going to be a online version of this, which we already do have. The biggest change will be that we just won’t mail them to people’s mailboxes, they will be able to get them at this location and several other locations. They are available in hard copy to folks. What we were finding is that there are stacks of them that are being left at the post office and that people are really aren’t utilizing those as much as they used to. I mean the way we use technology and the way we get our information has changed and not everyone get’s it that way, but we wanted to be very clear that people can still can get it that way. With that we do have an amendment, the amendment itself is going to talk about how having a postcard for the next three years. It was in the memo, but we did talk about it today and Mr. Derkevorkian and I decided that we would go on an amendment that would put that into this ordinance so that’s very clear what our wishes are.”
Cox then described the second portion of the ordinance;
“The second part to this, is the part of taking out, repealing KPB 4.10.110B. Which does take out the authorship for rejection or approval of a ballot, to seek authorship advocating for one or the other. And, I am in support of taking that out. And part of the reason I support that is that there is no requirement to that is people can literally write anything they want. The borough does not change anything, unless there are swear words in it. So, it does not have to be true, doesn’t have to be spelled correctly, doesn’t have to anything of any consequence to it. It could just be somebody saying whatever they feel for that and again it does not have to be true.”
The enacting of this ordinance replaces the mailing of the brochure with publishing the informational brochure online and providing mechanism for interested voters to request a hard copy, as that appears to be a more targeted approach.
Printed copies will be available in the Borough Clerk’s Office. In addition, the Borough Clerk’s Office will send a postcard to every registered voter for the next three years that includes a link to the internet address where the voter pamphlet can be found online.
