A8 The BulleTin • Tuesday, March 23, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
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Downtown
could falter
without tax
B
end’s downtown thrives because of its businesses,
the Downtown Bend Business Association and the
people who shop and visit downtown.
The Downtown Bend Business
Association promotes downtown
and cares for it. The DBBA does
everything from the flower bas-
kets to sidewalk cleaning to snow
removal to holiday decorations to
maintaining the banners, benches
and bike racks and also marketing
and advocacy for the downtown.
Much of that money comes
from an economic improvement
district. The district is an agree-
ment between building owners,
the downtown association and the
city. It is paid by downtown busi-
nesses for the businesses. And it’s
about to expire.
This is one of those situations
where some businesses actually
say: Please tax us to make our
community better.
The proposal is to renew it
again for another three years.
It would be 25 cents per square
foot in the first year and go up by
a penny each year. That might
raise about $250,000 each year.
The tax only covers businesses
in downtown Bend. There is
more information about it at
downtownbend.org.
There will be meetings about
it, a public hearing and a coun-
cil vote. There’s also sort of a vote
on it by the businesses that would
pay. We say “sort of” because ac-
cording to state law “when written
objections are received at the pub-
lic hearing from owners of prop-
erty upon which more than 33%
of the total amount of assessments
is levied” the assessment will not
be made. If all goes according to
plan, the economic improvement
district would officially kick in
on July 1. The problem for down-
town is that even if the district
passes it has not been enough to
fund everything that needs to get
done. The Downtown Bend Busi-
ness Association has asked the city
for additional funding — $30,000
in COVID-19 relief. It’s not clear if
the city will contribute.
The key for now is, at least,
passage of the renewal of the im-
provement district. Downtown
property owners need to decide
for themselves if they like it.
We would hate to see it fail, be-
cause it might be a terrible sign for
downtown’s future. Bend’s down-
town is the envy of many commu-
nities. But walk the streets now
and it’s easy to see exposed wires,
broken pavement and much more
that needs some tender loving
care. Don’t let Bend’s downtown
deteriorate. It won’t stay great un-
less we fight to keep it great.
Walkout-proofing
may get a walkout
T
he changes Democrats
want to make the Oregon
Legislature walkout-proof
may trigger another walkout.
The proposed changes include:
• Asking Oregonians to change
the state constitution so the Leg-
islature only needs a majority for
a quorum instead of two-thirds
of lawmakers present.
• Ask Oregonians to change
the state constitution so lawmak-
ers with 10 or more unexcused
absences can’t run for reelection
• And things like blocking leg-
islators from getting pay or not
allowing them to use political con-
tributions for unexcused absences.
As Oregon Public Broadcast-
ing pointed out though, when
Democrats wanted to talk about
them in the Senate Rules Com-
mittee, some Republican com-
mittee members just didn’t show
up. And it is certainly a possi-
bility that if Democrats try to
move forward on these changes,
Republicans will stage another
walkout and bring this session,
like the last session, to a crash-
ing halt. But some of the changes
could get on the ballot through
the initiative process, no matter
what Republican legislators do.
What are China’s leaders so afraid of?
BY FRED HIATT
The Washington Post
I
n a testy exchange kicking off the
first high-level talks between Chi-
nese Communist officials and the
Biden administration, China’s delegation
warned the United States not to go all
high-and-mighty.
“Many people within the United States
actually have little confidence in the de-
mocracy of the United States,” noted
Yang Jiechi, director of the Chinese
Office of the Central Commission for
Foreign Affairs, “and they have various
views regarding the government of the
United States.”
To which we Americans might re-
spond: Tell us something we don’t know.
“Various views” surely understates our
contentiousness, and whose confidence
in American democracy has not been
shaken after the past four years?
Yet I couldn’t help thinking: If China is
so confident in the superiority of its own
model — by contrast, “the leaders of
China have the wide support of the Chi-
nese people,” Yang insisted — why do its
leaders act so afraid?
Why would a popular government
lock up a man such as Wang Bingzhang,
for example?
Wang was a democracy advocate liv-
ing in North America in 2002 when
Chinese agents kidnapped him from a
meeting in Vietnam. They detained him
secretly for six months and then, in a
closed one-day “trial,” sentenced him to
life in prison.
If China’s Communist rulers are so
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi
Wright, Editor Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are
written by Richard Coe.
beloved, why are they afraid to let this
73-year-old man out of jail?
And I wondered: Why would such
a beloved regime be so afraid of Zhang
Zhan?
As The Washington Post’s Lily Kuo
reported, Zhang, a lawyer-turned-citi-
zen-journalist, was sentenced in a closed-
door trial at the end of December to four
years in prison for the crime of “picking
quarrels and provoking trouble.”
Zhang had traveled in February
2020 to Wuhan, where she filmed over-
whelmed hospitals as the city where the
COVID-19 pandemic began struggled
to cope with the virus. She was detained
in May and has been force-fed as she
conducts a hunger strike.
If China “has made decisive achieve-
ments and important strategic gains in
fighting COVID-19,” as Yang declared
during Friday’s summit, why would the
Communist Party worry about Zhang’s
reports?
For that matter, what could China’s
Communist rulers have to fear from
a slight, soft-spoken 24-year-old like
Joshua Wong?
Wong was sentenced in December to
13 1/2 months in prison for helping to or-
ganize and participating in a protest in
Hong Kong in 2019.
No one disputes that the protest was
peaceful. Wong’s true crime was in want-
ing to put Yang’s assertion of popularity
to the test: Wong favors free and open
elections, which the Communist Party
has never been willing to risk in China
and which now — despite having made
promises to the contrary — it has barred
in Hong Kong, too.
That is why, when Yang was lecturing
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan
about the popularity of his regime, the
only source he could cite was unspeci-
fied “opinion polls.”
Many Americans feared deeply for
our democracy as President Donald
Trump and his cronies chipped away at
the rule of law and flouted the constitu-
tional norms we had always counted on.
Yang is right about that.
And who would disagree, as George
Floyd’s killer goes on trial in Minnesota
and Asian women are gunned down in
Georgia, that “the challenges facing the
United States in human rights are deep-
seated,” as Yang put it.
Yet, last fall, Americans were able
to organize and rally and vote, and we
turned out one leader and installed an-
other.
I can endorse Yang’s criticism of U.S.
human rights without being sent to
prison for “picking quarrels and provok-
ing trouble.”
So I would say to Director Yang, you
are right about America. If you are just
as right about China, let Wang Bing-
zhang and Zhang Zhan and Joshua
Wong out of prison.
Let them speak their minds.
Let your people organize and rally and
vote.
Let us see how wide and deep your
support really is.
Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post.
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Making it harder to vote may not be good for Republicans
BY ROBERT GRIFFIN
Special to The Washington Post
I
n statehouses across the country,
Republicans have introduced, filed
or passed more than 250 bills that
are trying to make it harder to vote.
These have taken a variety of forms,
including eliminating opportunities
for voter registration, enacting stricter
voter ID laws and limiting both early
in-person voting and voting by mail.
One explanation for this push: Sub-
stantial numbers of Republicans say
there was widespread fraud during
the 2020 election. According to
mid-January data from the Democ-
racy Fund + UCLA Nationscape sur-
vey — a project I help manage — just
37% of Republicans were confident
that the 2020 election was conducted
fairly and accurately. These beliefs
persist despite Republican state of-
ficials such as Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensperger flatly deny-
ing fraud claims. Even former Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s director of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Se-
curity Agency went so far as to call the
2020 election “the most secure in U.S.
history.” Still, state-level Republicans
may be pursuing these legislative ef-
forts because they share these beliefs
and also want to respond to pressure
from substantial portions of their po-
litical base.
The second, and probably more
important, explanation is that Repub-
licans say restrictions on voting, par-
ticularly by mail, will benefit them in
future elections. But this may not be
the case.
It is nearly an article of faith among
Republicans that making voting
harder will help them at the bal-
lot box. Trump’s characteristically
brusque summary of this belief was
that “you’d never have a Republican
elected in this country again” if vot-
ing opportunities were expanded. In
January, a Republican election official
said that Georgia needed tougher laws
to reduce turnout, “so we at least have
a shot at winning.” Asked to justify
two Arizona voter restrictions before
the Supreme Court this month, the
lawyer for the state’s Republican Party
responded, simply, that easing them
“puts us at a competitive disadvantage
relative to Democrats.”
The unfortunate dynamic of the
2020 election — in no small part be-
cause of Trump’s own statements
castigating mail voting throughout
the campaign and encouraging his
supporters to vote in person — was
that Joe Biden’s supporters were far
more likely than Trump support-
ers to report that they voted by mail.
This unprecedented partisan gap in
vote method appears to have per-
suaded Republicans that vote-by-mail
boosted Democratic participation and
cost them the election. In the tsunami
of bills proposed since the election,
nothing has been as consistent a tar-
get as vote-by-mail. Out of the 253 re-
strictive bills currently tracked by the
Brennan Center, 125 include provi-
sions restricting vote-by-mail.
And yet, recent research has shown
that vote-by-mail does not offer any
substantive advantage to either politi-
cal party. One notable study analyzed
voting patterns from 1996 through
2018 in California, Utah and Wash-
ington, three states that implemented
universal vote-by-mail in many or all
of their counties. The authors found
that universal vote-by-mail did not
significantly change either party’s vote
share. A similar study of these three
states’ vote-by-mail rollout came to
the same conclusion.
What about the 2020 election, a cy-
cle where there was a substantial in-
crease in the number of Americans
who voted by mail? At present, ana-
lysts say that the substantial increase
in early voting and vote-by-mail pri-
marily represented a swap: Voters
who would have voted in person on
Election Day decided to cast their bal-
lot using these alternative methods.
Consider this interesting study of
voting patterns among voters in Texas
and Indiana. In both states, voters
65 and older could vote by mail with
fewer restrictions than those 64 and
younger. This age cutoff created a nat-
ural experiment, in which otherwise
similar populations had different lev-
els of access to vote-by-mail. If greater
access to vote-by-mail substantially
benefited Democrats, we would see
the effect here. In reality, the effect
was so small as to be statistically in-
distinguishable from zero.
Zooming out from vote-by-mail,
even the idea that a larger electorate
naturally favors Democrats should
be viewed with skepticism. The 2020
presidential race had the highest turn-
out in more than a century. And yet it
was also an election in which Trump
lost the electoral vote because of
only 42,918 votes spread across three
states, Republicans in the House actu-
ally picked up 14 seats, and state-level
Republicans picked up trifecta gov-
ernments in two additional states. Is
this really what a natural Democratic
advantage looks like?
In addition, it is easy enough to
imagine a future where the Repub-
lican Party would generally benefit
from higher turnout and easier ac-
cess to the ballot. Over the last several
presidential elections, there has been
a steadily growing education divide
between the parties. College-educated
voters have shifted toward the Dem-
ocratic Party while noncollege voters
have shifted toward the Republican
Party. Should these trends continue,
these lower-turnout noncollege vot-
ers are some of the very groups that
could benefit from election laws that
make voting easier. The nonpartisan
group VoteRiders, for example, has
suggested that Georgia’s proposed
photocopied ID requirement could
burden rural and older voters, who
lean Republican, just as it might bur-
den groups who typically lean Dem-
ocratic. The reality is that election
laws are complicated and incentivize
voter behavior in complex ways that
are context dependent. This makes it
very difficult to predict precisely who
would benefit from a given reform —
if anyone at all.
While the eventual fate of these
Republican bills is uncertain, the evi-
dence is fairly clear: There is no sub-
stantive justification for many of these
efforts, and even the basic partisan
logic behind them is tenuous.
e e
Robert Griffin is a political scientist and research
director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study
Group.