Tag Archive for Legislation

Mackinac Center’s ‘VoteSpotter’ Application for Smartphones

A Useful Political Intelligence Tool for Political Junkies

VoteSpotter JPG Image
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has created a free, interactive smartphone app which tracks state and federal bills pending floor action and your legislators’ votes.on those bills. This useful app is called VoteSpotter and has has been debugged to the point where it works well. There are only about 1,000 Android users of this app presently, but it is growing in popularity. It is available from both the Google PlayStore and the Apple IOS App Store.

You enter your voting address and the program determines your state and federal representatives from its database. Then you receive regular notifications of impending legislation soon to be voted upon by those legislators, described in plain English. You can then contact your legislator on any legislation for which you receive a notification, indicate your preference before the vote, and then concur or disagree with your legislator after the vote. Legislators have access to the ‘polls’, but not your individual information unless you elect to send them an email through the program.

Mackinac Center is now in the process of extending this application beyond the State of Michigan.

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HB 5108 Fights Crony Capitalism, Protects Personal Property Rights

You bought it...you own it!

Tickets

It doesn’t matter the industry impacted or how long a law has been on the books. Any law that restricts our personal property rights in favor of crony capitalism should be abolished. That’s why lawmakers need to take action on House Bill 5108.

Right now, if you try to re-sell your sports or entertainment ticket above face value, you are a criminal under Michigan law. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to unload a couple of tickets from your season ticket package or whether you can no longer go to that concert and only want to sell your tickets for face value plus “convenience fees.”

That is, unless you use a specially-designated “vendor” given a monopoly by the team or venue over all ticket resales. Companies like StubHub and Ticketmaster are milking honest fans by tacking on additional fees just for the “right” to resell a ticket that you already own and are turning around and paying a kickback to the venue for their state-protected monopoly.

House Bill 5108 will end this ridiculous law and open the secondary ticket market up to be more fair and free – everybody will have the same rights and nobody is forced to break the law or pay additional fees just to resell their own property.

The House passed the bill in the spring. And given the Republican supermajority in the Senate you would think this bill would be a slam dunk, right? Apparently not because the bill has been stuck in committee for months.

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Codifying the Legality of Open Carry in Michigan

Michigan Open Carry has been involved in getting HB 5091 and 5092 pushed through.

Basically, these two pieces of legislation further define what constitutes brandishing, a definition that more clearly shows that open carry is not brandishing.

We also pushed forward some substitutions to make things even better:
http://rrfaae.com/dump/MOC/H03891’13%20(H-1).pdf (for 5091)
http://rrfaae.com/dump/MOC/H03299’13%20Star%20(H-1).pdf (for 5092)

These substitutions sailed through committee. Vote to report will most likely be next week.

Appreciation goes to Rep. Joel Johnson and Rep. Brandon Dillon for moving these through.

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