Lincoln’s Election Calendar Now Comes With A $9,150 Correction Fee

Lincoln must pay Nebraska’s attorney general’s office $9,150 after losing a fight over when three citizen-led charter amendments belonged on the ballot, the Nebraska Examiner reported October 22. The state Supreme Court had ruled 5–2 that the measures should go before voters on November 3. The city had argued for May.

Not whether the public could vote. Which month the public could vote in. The calendar has acquired outside counsel.

Attorney General Mike Hilgers requested $19,107 in costs, including a $132 filing charge and attorneys’ fees. Three attorneys estimated about 61 hours of work at rates from $300 to $375 an hour. The court awarded $9,150.

There are free calendars on the internet, but none offers this level of adversarial date selection.

The city’s argument lost. That matters. So does what the argument was. Lincoln acknowledged that the amendments qualified for voter consideration; it disputed the timing. City Attorney Yohance Christie defended a good-faith, reasonable interpretation in a case of first impression. The city also points to the split ruling as evidence that this was a legitimate dispute.

Hilgers takes a different view. He says the constitutional mandate was clear, the lawsuit should never have been necessary, and the fee award may deter officials from ignoring the Constitution in future.

A constitutional lesson, delivered to a city by charging the city. The officials are the intended students. The residents have apparently enrolled in the financing programme.

The mayor’s chief of staff, Rick Hoppe, calls the fee request an unusual choice that penalizes Lincoln taxpayers. That objection does not undo the ruling. It does give residents the unusual experience of financing both the constitutional lesson and the complaint about the tuition.

The fee order itself drew two unnamed dissents. Even the price of finishing the disagreement required another disagreement. Somewhere there should be a meter recording when a government dispute has cost more to conclude than it would cost to provide every participant with a very nice calendar and a fucking pencil.

Meanwhile, look at what some of these amendments concern. Aligning city elections with statewide elections. In other words, voters are being asked to decide how the election calendar should work after governments finished litigating the election calendar required for asking them.

Democracy has developed a scheduling prequel.

Before you can vote on when to vote, seven judges must settle when you may vote on when to vote. Then comes the separate argument over how much the argument cost. Somewhere in Nebraska there is an entirely innocent wall calendar that could not possibly have anticipated the burden being placed on its little squares.

And now voters get their turn on November 3. They may support the amendments or reject them. Nothing in the fee award makes either answer correct.

At least filling in the ballot should be straightforward: make your choice, move on to the next question.

Try not to spend 61 billable hours doing it. The government has already covered that stage of participation.