The History of NOT-A

Today we’re celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the first NOT-A election.

Back in 2020, it was a brand new, radical idea. People liked the concept but couldn’t figure out how it could work in actual practice. However, they were tired of going to the polls on each and every election day, trying up until the last minute to decide who they would vote for, in other words, who was the least bad of a bad slate of candidates.

It started on a golf course in Florida one sunny day in 2019 when a threesome composed of a retiring Senator, a disenchanted Congressperson, and a young Congressional aide fresh out of Georgetown who was still idealistic enough to actually try to come up with ideas to make the Northern Fifty a better place to live.

Pat Hanover, aide to the Congressperson, brought up an idea s/he’d been pondering for some time. It was postulated that, since the voters were complaining about not having good options to choose from every election cycle, perhaps they could be given an additional choice: None of the Above, or NOT-A as it came to be called.

If NOT-A received more votes than any of the candidates for a given office, there would be a second election held in sixty days. It was stipulated that none of the previous candidates could run again, so the voters were given choices from a brand new slate. Since there were only sixty days between elections, it was thought that the voters wouldn’t have time to become too disenchanted with the new candidates. If NOT-A won again in this second election, that position would remain vacant until the next regularly scheduled election.

Additionally, in this case, any appointees of the previous chairholder would be required to step down, allowing the salaried personnel of the department to run things until a candidate was elected.

Pat knew how things worked on the Hill, so s/he wrote the addendum and attached it to a bill s/he knew would pass during the current session. The bill increased the current retirement benefits given to Congresspeople and provided for a 10% per year raise for them ad infinitum. As Pat anticipated, nobody actually read the bill. It passed unanimously and became the law of the land.

At that point, Pat made sure that the next group of ballots that came out had None of the Above in large, bold print below the names of the current candidates in each category.

The first hour the polls were open, for the first time in many years, voters came out smiling. The few local media people who were at the polls to interview departing voters were surprised and wanted to know what was going on. Word spread quickly up the chain and by the second hour, puzzled national news anchors and self-important talking heads were on the air, trying to figure out and explain the implications of having NOT-A take the most votes.

By the end of the day, to the dismay of the mainstream candidates, it appeared that NOT-A had won in a landslide in almost every individual election. Only Grandma Jones in Saint Donatus, Iowa, population 140 (52 of whom were registered to vote and 43 of whom were her descendants) had been re-elected mayor.

When the candidates realized what had happened, they scrambled to have the law declared illegal, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court in record time. The amused Judges decided unanimously that it was all quite legal under the terms of the Constitution. Privately, they thought the pompous politicians had received their due.

As might be expected, it took a few years for things to settle down, and there was a bit of chaos at first. There were benefits, unintended consequences perhaps. New candidates stepped up, many of them middle-of-the-roaders willing to cooperate with other elected officials in order to get the job done. Since there were only 60 days between elections, there wasn’t time to spend multi-millions on campaigns so people who previously hadn’t been able to afford to run for office now could. Another benefit was the elimination of whole categories of hangers-on such as lobbyists and retired government officials.

It wasn’t long before other countries adapted NOT-A to their own election processes. Now, 25 years later, NOT-A has become the most widely elected entity the world has ever known.