Pat Sajak: Limit Public Employees' Right to Vote

Sometimes there's too much of a conflict of interest, he says
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 13, 2010 5:01 PM CDT
Pat Sajak: Limit Public Employees' Right to Vote
Vermont residents mark their ballots in Middlesex in this file photo from August.   (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

Pat Sajak says he doesn't allow family or friends to play Wheel of Fortune because it would be a conflict of interest. By the same logic—and this is where the slope gets very slippery—he wonders whether state and federal employees should be allowed to vote in elections on "matters that would benefit them directly," he writes in his blog on the conservative Ricochet site.

"I'm not suggesting that public employees should be denied the right to vote, but that there are certain cases in which their stake in the matter may be too great," writes Sajak. "If, for example, a ballot initiative appears that might cap the benefits of a certain group of state workers, should those workers be able to vote on the matter? Plainly, their interests as direct recipients of the benefits are far greater than the interests of others whose taxes support such benefits." He acknowledges that determining what constitutes a conflict of interest would open a "Pandora's box."
(More Pat Sajak stories.)

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